Top crypto stories of week 22, 2026
Mon 25 to Sun 31 May 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 25 to Sun 31 May 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 15 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, farcaster.xyz.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- What Happened to Crypto? (open.substack.com)
Capital, not shared vision, sustained Ethereum's ecosystem, and that ecosystem is now in narrative paralysis. Venture capital, DAO grant programs and speculative inflows funded developers, conferences and service providers, with Ethereum acting as a facilitation layer rather than a product. The hoped-for alternative economy did not outgrow traditional finance, as fintech firms like Stripe and Ramp execute faster and are likely to capture much of this cycle's surplus. The Ethereum Foundation has lost momentum amid tremendous employee churn, and Bankless is making a narrative pivot.
- Lawsuit claims 3.8M BTC via NYPD lost property filings (x.com)
- Hey: New Team, New Vision, a Real Business Model for Decentralized Social Media (hey.xyz)
- no slop grenade (noslopgrenade.com)
The choice between Redis and Memcached depends on specific requirements, existing infrastructure, and team expertise, with no single option best for all cases. Redis offers data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets, along with RDB and AOF persistence, built-in replication, Lua scripting, and pub/sub messaging, but it has more features and higher complexity. Memcached uses a simpler multi-threaded architecture with slab allocation and typically shows better throughput for simple key-value operations, while Redis is better suited to complex data operations or persistence.
- @cassie: Neynar refuses to work with us despite repeated attempts (warpcast.com)
Cassie, writing on her own behalf, says Neynar refuses to work with her team despite repeated attempts to engage, and she argues that the refusal is not a technical problem. She says Neynar has tried to misinform and make unjustified claims about her team's efforts, and she states she is tired of engaging with a leadership team she says does not engage earnestly. She points to a GitHub pull request in the farcasterxyz/snapchain repository as evidence of Neynar's position.
- @cassie: Hypersnap lets you have Farcaster Pro features for free (farcaster.xyz)
- The Eternal Sloptember (geohot.github.io)
The author argues that adopting AI agents into software development will be one of the field's most costly mistakes, because agents are statistical models that mimic the distribution of programming and produce output that is broken in increasingly hard-to-detect ways. Their experience over six months, including work on tinygrad and reverse-engineering a USB-to-PCIe chip, led them to conclude that agents often front-load progress and then fail to deliver polish. They predict agents will hurt large organizations more than high-performing individuals or small teams, since bottom performers lack the self-check that strong engineers apply when reading code. They also expect more code and apps overall, but lower average quality, and they align with the LeCun and Marcus view that real programming agents will need world models.
- Farcaster: Pro memberships expiring, rethinking features before next phase (farcaster.xyz)
Farcaster says a large batch of Pro memberships expire tomorrow and that it is taking time to decide what Pro should look like going forward. The team says both the community and the team have changed since Pro launched, so it wants to be deliberate about the right mix of Pro features. The existing Pro features remain available for renewal, though the team does not expect everyone to renew. It also says it has ideas it is excited about, including some highly requested features, but is not rushing them out, and that Pro users will likely remain the first test group for new rollouts.
- @BMF_Bund: Germany's cabinet approves more tax transparency for crypto (x.com)
- Why Ethereum is materially mispriced, my fair value, and the framework … (x.com)
The author argues that Ethereum's fees should not be treated as revenue, since falling fees reflect growing use, and that ETH should be valued as the collateral securing the value on the chain. The article says fees per transaction fell from more than $50 at the 2021 peak to about $0.20, while transaction counts reached more than triple the 2021 level. It puts the value on Ethereum at about $250B, against roughly $72B in staked ETH, and from that gap derives a fair value near $6,900 per ETH versus about $2,070 spot. It argues that Ethereum, unlike Linux or the DTCC, buys its security with its own asset, so ETH's value is tied to the security of the network.
- Haute Slop (outlandart.substack.com)
The central argument is that the art and luxury fashion worlds are backing away from generative AI while also being pulled into it, and that the moralistic tone of much criticism has undermined the risk-taking that moves culture forward. The article cites the British Museum's removal of AI-generated images posted in January, which an Artnet report said came down within six hours, and Gucci's AI images from creative director Demna, who told CNN Style, "If I can use it to do something that gives me a quick idea or visualization of something, why shouldn't I do it?" It contrasts these with Hermès hiring illustrator Linda Merad in early 2026 to create digital assets with a distinctly manual feel. The article is written by Sarah Hromack, founder of Soft Labor.
- Ethereum Staking Queue Reaches 3.4M ETH as Exit Backlog Drops to 64 ETH (thedefiant.io)
- How Interfold Works (blog.theinterfold.com)
Interfold is a distributed network for confidential coordination that lets independent parties produce shared, verifiable outcomes from private inputs without pooling data, relying on trusted hardware, or giving one operator unilateral control over execution. The article says it does this through ephemeral Encrypted Execution Environments (E3s), each created for one computation and closed after its result is released. Independent ciphernodes, selected by protocol rules into a committee for each computation, handle threshold key generation and decryption, and no single ciphernode can expose inputs or release results alone. In the sealed-bid auction example, bids stay encrypted during execution and only the permitted result, such as a winner or clearing price, is released.
- Neocypherpunk Summit #1 (s26ber.web3privacy.info)
The Neocypherpunk Summit, held at Berlin's historic Funkhaus, gathers hacktivists, researchers, technologists, whistleblowers, philosophers, lawyers and policy-makers to explore how open protocols and privacy tools can serve as shared foundations for digital autonomy, free assembly and accountability. The event is organized around themes including cryptography as civic infrastructure, resistance networks under political duress, and AI, power and the surveillance economy. Listed speakers include Ramy Raoof Halim, Isabela Fernandes of Tor, Marek Tuszynski of Tactical Tech, and Geert Lovink of the Institute of Network Cultures.
- ECB Pushes Back on Euro Stablecoin Proposals, Citing Bank Lending Risks (beincrypto.com)
- Ethereum Security QF Round: Results (April 23 - May 14, 2026) (forum.giveth.io)
The Ethereum Security QF Round, run from April 23 to May 14, 2026, concluded with a 637.4274 ETH matching pool, which the announcement describes as the largest quadratic funding matching pool to date. Giveth's review team, applying eligibility criteria set by the Ethereum Foundation, accepted 134 projects from more than 250 applications. Final results list 13,805 total donations from 3,934 unique donors, totaling $315,020 in USD, with 172 of 200 badge holders participating. Matching used COCM, with a 4× multiplier on ETHSecurity Badge holders' donations, a 5% maximum and a 0.3333 ETH floor per project.
- @VitalikButerin: Interfold implements MACI ideas with threshold encryption & FHE (firefly.social)
Vitalik Buterin says the Interfold, a privacy protocol, implements the MACI ideas he has promoted for almost a decade, now in a generalized form suited to voting and other uses such as secret-ballot auctions. The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, voters submit votes onchain with a ZKP proving eligibility, and an arbitrary computation runs inside FHE before threshold decryption. Buterin lists voter anonymity as unconditional when eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs, censorship resistance as guaranteed by Ethereum, and result correctness as ensurable via ZK over FHE. Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty, and ZK over FHE currently works properly only for additive vote tallying.
- Finance Isn’t Enough (x.com)
Reaching one billion crypto users will be difficult with financial assets alone, and the argument proposes tokenized cultural assets, tied to emotion, identity and social meaning, as the alternative. The 180 million monthly active wallets are estimated at 40-60 million real humans after a 3-5x deflation factor, so 50 million users would need an 82% CAGR over five years to reach one billion. Polymarket, with 688k monthly active users, is described as roughly where WhatsApp was in mid-2012, and stablecoin adoption may run through apps where users never hold wallets.
- @maraoz: coding agents are superhuman at finding vulnerabilities in DeFi (x.com)
- From Trading to Addiction: How Retail Investors Slip into the Perpetual Trap (wublock.substack.com)
Perpetual futures, a crypto derivative with no expiry date that BitMEX launched in May 2016, are presented here as a product whose structure and reward patterns encourage gambling-like trading addiction. The article argues that the variable, unpredictable returns and frequent feedback of perpetual trading mirror slot machines and the psychology described by B.F. Skinner, whose pigeon experiments showed that uncertain rewards sustain persistent behavior. It also says that 24/7 markets and leverage of up to 100x remove the natural breaks that might restrain compulsive trading.