Top crypto stories of week 26, 2026
Mon 22 to Sun 28 June 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 22 to Sun 28 June 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 3 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com, firefly.social.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Tokédex — The Tokenomic Bible pre-order and fun Tokemon’s (tokedex.org)
- The EF’s new structure | Ethereum Foundation Blog (blog.ethereum.org)
The Ethereum Foundation has restructured into five clusters (protocol, access, user, community and institutional layers) plus operations and management, concluding a months-long reorganization. The change removes 54 colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will look for ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the organization. Departing staff receive severance equal to the higher of one month's pay per year worked or the amount locally mandated, along with transition support and a small transition grant for expenses such as career coaching. The EF says it will share more about each cluster's structure and work in the coming month.
- Why Bihu and Mirror Failed: The Rise and Fall of Crypto Social Platforms (wublock.substack.com)
Bihu and Mirror.xyz, once leading crypto content platforms in China and the West, both declined, with the article attributing their failures to weak incentive models, market downturns, and internal disagreements. Bihu, founded in early 2018, paid writers in KEY tokens, but after the token price collapsed and China tightened crypto rules after 2021, it shut down on March 21, 2022. Mirror.xyz, founded in October 2020 by Denis Nazarov and valued at around $100 million in media reports, struggled after the 2022 bear market, high gas fees, and internal divisions over its direction. Paragraph acquired Mirror in May 2024 and announced its sunset in mid-September 2025.
- "Thanks for the airdrop" (x.com)
The author, who works at ENS Labs, argues that the ENS DAO's token airdrop largely failed to create broad, lasting governance, and supports a proposal from Katherine Wu for a five-seat Foundation board to manage the DAO's treasury. The author says only about 22% of airdrop recipients still hold any $ENS, and 6.9% have held at least their full airdrop amount, with most recipients selling early. The author contends that the Foundation would change stewardship of the treasury and endowment while tokenholders keep control over protocol governance and the power to approve and remove Foundation directors.
- @LefterisJP: ENS DAO proposal to transfer $500M treasury to foundation (x.com)
- @VitalikButerin: EF cutting budget 40%, shifting to endowment model (x.com)
Vitalik Buterin says the Ethereum Foundation is cutting its budget by roughly 40% this year as it shifts to an endowment model, a change set out in last year's Treasury Management Policy. The EF plans to reduce annual spending from about 15% of its remaining funds before 2026 to a post-2030 target of about 5% per year. Buterin says the cuts mean real losses, including fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects, PSE winding down as a unit, and a smaller, less lavish Devcon. He also says the EF will rely more on AI-assisted formal verification than on client redundancy for security.
- @zacodil: Base was down for two hours after one bad block, no backup sequencer (firefly.social)
Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network, was down for almost two hours after a single consensus bug produced one invalid block right after block 47806542, and all later blocks stopped. The author argues that the outage shows the risk of running one sequencer, since no backup producer or other validators existed to keep the chain running. Node operators had to restart manually before syncing recovered, and during the outage no trades, liquidations or withdrawals could be processed. The article also cites a sequencer handoff failure that froze Base for 33 minutes last August.
- Reclaiming Opacity: The Imperative for Privacy in Crypto (helius.dev)
Crypto must reclaim privacy and opacity, because transparency has become a self-imposed form of surveillance that the text calls an auto-panopticon. Bitcoin made financial activity permanently traceable, turning crypto's promise of liberation into a record of behavior and affiliations. Shoshana Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism, the mass harvesting and commodification of personal data. Cambridge Analytica, a British firm active from 2013 to 2018, harvested Facebook user data for political profiling and was involved in the 2016 UK EU membership referendum.
- ENS DAO proposal to dissolve and transfer $500M treasury to foundation (firefly.social)
- @aerugoettinea: EF's mandate is to ensure Ethereum remains permissionless (x.com)
The Ethereum Foundation's mandate is to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains free and open source, censorship resistant, private, and secure permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty. The text calls for defending against MEV extraction at whole-system scale, making unconditional privacy the default, and keeping staking permissionless and plural. It also lists opportunities to pursue, including post-quantum cryptographic migration, personal wallets paired with AI agents that users can run themselves, and ETH as private digital cash. The EF is also moving its own compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and Ethereum-native stablecoins.
- @lassejaco: yes, I was one of the Ethereum Foundation employees fired today (x.com)
- @buildonbase: Base Mainnet halted due to block production issue (x.com)
- Claim your free 0xNAME - Ethereum’s leading public good naming service (app.0xname.foo)
- @ethlabs_org: announcing Ethlabs, a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum (x.com)
Ethlabs has been announced as a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH, with the stated mission of making Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy. The announcement argues that Ethereum is uniquely positioned to serve as the neutral base layer on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation. It says Ethlabs will work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, institutions, ETH holders, and core developers and researchers, turning their needs into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products. The post also states that the team has spent the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development.
- Bluesky reaches 45M users, nearly the population of Argentina (bsky.app)
- Kiwi News Weekly Digest — Jun 28, 2026 (buttondown.com)
- @cassie: Farcaster should be free to join without forcing crypto onboarding (farcaster.xyz)
Cassie argues that Farcaster should be free to join without an onboarding process that forces users to engage with crypto directly. The post compares crypto to databases, queues, caches, and logging infrastructure, calling it a technology that should be an implementation detail rather than the focus. It contends that the industry has been fixated on the technology itself when the more important question is what it enables.
- @zacodil: Base's outage shows single sequencer risk, dirty memory state bug (firefly.social)
Base's outage, as described in a post-mortem, came from a sequencer that hit an invalid transaction while building a block and failed to clear the leftover memory state it had touched. The next valid transaction ran on that dirty state, miscalculated its gas, and produced a block whose math did not check out. Other nodes re-executed the block, detected the mismatch and rejected it, which the author calls correct behavior. The author argues that because Base has a single block producer, no other party could build a valid replacement, so the rejection itself became a two-hour outage, whereas on a chain with many producers the next block producer would simply build the next block.
- US accelerates post-quantum crypto deadlines to 2030–2031 (abyssdomain.expert)
- @Cbb0fe: 6 years of full-time crypto investing had multiple 6-month dry spells (x.com)
Over six years as full-time crypto investors, the author's group had several periods of six or more months in which they made very little money and gave back many of their gains. The author says these dry spells were not much discussed on crypto Twitter, where people mostly appear to be winning, and that during them the group failed at almost everything it tried, missed many opportunities, and could not identify the next big trend. The author also says enduring these periods requires being somewhat obsessed and continuing to believe when nothing is working, and that most people eventually quit while those who stay usually get another chance.