Top crypto stories of week 21, 2026
Mon 18 to Sun 24 May 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 18 to Sun 24 May 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 24 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, firefly.social.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @lukOlejnik: Telegram exposes auth_key_id over unencrypted TCP enabling tracking (firefly.social)
Telegram sends MTProto traffic over unencrypted TCP, exposing a long-lived auth_key_id that lets network observers track users without breaking message encryption. According to the text, the identifier stays stable across app restarts, IP changes, VPN use, network switches, and location changes, and an ISP, hotel WiFi operator, mobile carrier, or surveillance system on the path could see it passively. The text warns that this enables retroactive correlation, so months of activity on different networks could become searchable once the same identity is tied to a real name on one network. The proposed fix is mandatory transport encryption for all MTProto connections with no unencrypted fallback, which the text says Telegram has chosen not to implement.
- @aboutcircles: Circles Garage hackathon for building on community money protocol (firefly.social)
The Circles project has opened Circles Garage, a six-week hackathon inviting developers to build useful applications on top of its community money protocol. The announcement describes six weekly prizes and a grand trophy, and it suggests possible projects such as marketplaces, voting tools, mutual-aid apps and loyalty programmes. Participants can find details at garage.aboutcircles.com.
- Keycard: Secure Crypto & Hardware Wallet (keycard.tech)
Keycard is a product page for an open-source, air-gapped hardware wallet system built around swappable smart cards, with the Keycard Shell as an optional signing device. The page says each Keycard holds its own mnemonic words and can be switched in seconds, and that Shell signs by showing a QR code to the computer without connecting to it. It states that firmware and card applets are MIT licensed, that the card's software is sealed and cannot be updated, and that the Keycard works with 15+ software wallets. A Keycard Shell bundle with two Keycards is listed at €129,00, down from €149,00.
- Ethereum Foundation Sees 2 More High-Profile Departures (cointelegraph.com)
Two top Ethereum Foundation researchers, Julian Ma and Carl Beek, have resigned, bringing the total of high-profile departures at the organization to at least eight in recent months. Ma contributed to Ethereum's censorship-resistant properties and cross-layer bridge work, and said he left to focus on product and growth, calling the foundation "an amazing place but not right for my next steps." Beek, who contributed to the early design of the Beacon Chain, said he was leaving on May 29 to spend time with his wife and 1-month-old child. Ma and Beek join five senior developers and researchers who left in May alone.
- @jchaskin22: You cannot understand cypherpunk in 2026 if your framework is macro (firefly.social)
- Cloudflare’s write up on Mythos (x.com)
- @Laguich_: Ethereum Foundation published kohaku-eth/railgun on npm (firefly.social)
- @vitalik.eth: EF will focus on CROPS, longevity over breadth, provable security (farcaster.xyz)
Vitalik Buterin writes that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) is refocusing on CROPS (censorship resistance, open, private, and secure systems) and longevity over breadth, which means selling less ETH. He says the EF has about 0.16% of all ETH and that its original limited scope was fully completed in 2022, so it should act as one node among others rather than the center of Ethereum. Buterin lists goals including provably bug-free Ethereum, available chain consensus, and intermediary minimization, with work such as FOCIL, EIP-8141, and Kohaku. He says the EF will be a smaller, more opinionated organization, and that he is only one board member and his own power there will decrease.
- A shallow dive into formal verification (vitalik.eth.limo)
The post argues that formal verification, which means writing code in Lean or low-level languages and checking its correctness with machine-verifiable mathematical proofs, could make software far more efficient and secure, and it is gaining traction in Ethereum's frontier research and in other areas of computing. It cites Yoichi Hirai's description of this as the "final form of software development." As an example, it points to a group's proof that a theorem about Signal's X3DH protocol reduces to the DDH assumption, and it notes that such proofs carry asterisks, such as the risk of proving the wrong claims or of bugs in the Lean implementation itself. The author states disagreement with pessimistic views about AI-driven bug discovery, calling that challenge transitional and expecting a more defense-favoring equilibrium. The post says Mozilla shares this view, though its post contains no mention of formal verification.
- Agentic Capital Markets: How Autonomous Agents Will Be Funded (x.com)
A capital market for autonomous, agent-run organizations is predicted to form within ten years, with rating agencies, underwriters, indices and brokers channeling capital to agents without a single allocator's discretion. The text cites cost as the main driver: it estimates an agent-run marketing agency at about $250,000 a year in inference and tools, against $1.8 million in labor for a fifteen-person human firm. It also notes that Wyoming's 2021 DAO LLC statute lets an algorithm manage an LLC that can sign contracts and hold accounts. It then outlines a layered financing stack, from venture equity to programmatic advances, revenue-based financing and slate funds.
- @dankrad: Ethereum needs a $1b+ org funded by staking revenue and accountable (x.com)
Dankrad argues that Ethereum needs a community-created organization that is economically aligned with ETH and accountable to it. He says the Ethereum Foundation holds less than 0.1% of all ETH and receives no flow of staking or fee revenue. He proposes an organization with at least $1 billion in funding, led by a competent leader, overseen by a board of people who want ETH to go up, and permanently funded by a significant share of staking revenue, adjustable through a governance mechanism.
- Eric Schmidt booed on university stage for AI remarks (x.com)
- Congress hits Polymarket and Kalshi with a massive insider trading probe (coindesk.com)
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has opened an investigation into Polymarket and Kalshi over concerns that U.S. government employees may be using insider information to profit from policy and national security events. Comer sent letters Friday to Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour demanding details on identity verification, geographic restrictions and the flagging of anomalous trading. Comer said he may pursue legislation barring members of Congress, administration officials and other government employees from prediction markets. Separately, Nicolas Vaiman of Bubblemaps said his team found 80 Polymarket bets with a 98% win rate, which he called statistically impossible.
- Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom (pocketcasts.com)
Caitlin Kalinowski, most recently at OpenAI helping build its robotics and hardware teams, discusses in a podcast episode why she believes the AI hardware boom is just beginning. Her background includes leading AR glasses and VR hardware at Meta, where she worked on every generation of the Quest, Rift, and Orion, and earlier serving as technical lead on MacBook Air and Mac Pro at Apple. The episode covers topics including why VR did not take off despite strong hardware, a coming memory price shock that leads her to advise startups to pre-buy, why humanoid robots are still prototypes, and why she left OpenAI.
- @github: Employee device compromised via poisoned VS Code extension (x.com)
- VVV: Crypto AI's Most Underappreciated Revenue Story (x.com)
Venice, a privacy-first AI inference platform, is presented as undervalued, with its VVV token at about a $660M market cap and $1.12B fully diluted value. The case rests on an estimated current ARR of about $60M, derived from roughly 3.0M signups as of May 16, 2026 and an assumed 150K paying subscribers, and on new ARR being added at an annualized rate of about $200M. On current ARR, VVV trades at roughly 11x revenue, compared with 26x for OpenRouter, which is named as a private inference peer. The API revenue figures are estimates, since the text says they are not directly disclosed.
- Layerzero KelpDAO incident report (layerzero.network)
- Digital artists were right all along, says Trevor Paglen (artbasel.com)
Artist Trevor Paglen argues that digital artists were right all along, since digital tools are now part of how all artists work and digital stuff is simply what surrounds us. He notes that artists have always used whatever materials are at hand, and that painters and sculptors he knows routinely mock up work digitally before making physical pieces. Paglen says he believes in galleries, curation and criticism and wants art that challenges audiences, and he presents Zero 10: The Condition, the 2026 Swiss edition of Art Basel's digital initiative, as evidence that digital work deserves serious attention. The exhibition runs June 17 to 21, 2026, at Event Hall during Art Basel.
- @halecar2: NFTs didn't escape gatekeeping, they just made the hierarchy faster (firefly.social)
NFTs did not escape gatekeeping, according to the author, who argues that visibility, attention and support remain concentrated despite open blockchain infrastructure. The article says NFTs reproduced the social structures of the traditional art world almost immediately, with a small group of artists canonized early, collectors clustering around them, and platforms amplifying them. It states that the success rate for NFT-native artists is not radically different from the traditional art world, and that communities often form around asset performance before art, disappearing when prices collapse.
- Bitcoin Faces Greater Quantum Computing Risk Than Ethereum, Citi Warns (decrypt.co)
Citi researchers warn that Bitcoin faces significantly greater quantum computing risk than Ethereum, because fixing the problem depends on governance consensus rather than code. The analysts say recent breakthroughs have shortened the timeline for practical quantum attacks on digital assets, with recent targets revised to 2030-2032. They estimate 6.7 to 7 million BTC sit in dormant wallets with exposed public keys, including roughly 1 million Bitcoin believed mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, worth an estimated $82 billion at current prices. The analysts flag BIP-360 and BIP-361 as proposed upgrades to watch.