Top crypto stories of week 38, 2026
Mon 14 to Sun 20 September 2026
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 14 to Sun 20 September 2026, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 4 comments in total. Most-shared sources: x.com.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- @not_ellington: crypto is millennial coded, normies associate it with scams (x.com)
The author argues that crypto is seen as millennial coded and that ordinary people associate it with gambling and scams. They say NFT swindlers and rug pullers have ruined Satoshi's vision, and that moving to a non-fiat currency in their lifetimes would require rebuilding crypto from scratch.
- Open-source AI is only ‘unstoppable’ when its developers are protected (p2p.coincenter.org)
Laz argues that open-source AI is only "unstoppable" once published, and that its development can still be halted by prosecuting developers, so developers need legal protection. He points to the Tornado Cash case, where U.S. Treasury sanctions on the protocol's smart contracts on August 8, 2022, and the prosecutions of Roman Storm and Roman Semenov in the U.S. and Alexey Pertsev in the Netherlands did not stop its use. He also cites Coin Center fellow Michael Lewellen's lawsuit against the DOJ and argues that centralized AI regulation, such as licensing or approval regimes that frontier labs have pushed for, would concentrate control over information.
- vitalik.eth: Qwen 3.8 flash and llama.cpp make local AI models viable (farcaster.xyz)
Vitalik Buterin writes that Qwen 3.8 flash is impressive and that llama.cpp has been rapidly improving at running it, and he says local models are close to handling a large share of tasks. He reports benchmark results from his laptop, which uses a Strix Halo chip, with columns for pre-existing prompt, new prompt, generated tokens, input tokens per second, and output tokens per second. He also suggests that using a local model to orchestrate queries to powerful remote models could become viable, so that personal information does not leak to those models.
- @SCBuergel: $120k for a local-first Safe UI (x.com)
- Why Crypto Businesses All Look the Same Now (x.com)
Many onchain crypto experiments from the idealist era are shutting down or pivoting without proving product-market fit, a trend that has become clearer in 2026. The onchain market is polarizing between speculative areas such as memecoins, perpetual futures and prediction markets, and real-economy areas such as stablecoins, RWAs and vaults. Companies including Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask and Kalshi are converging on the same product stack. Examples include the Terra ecosystem's UST, whose value fell to zero, and restaking, whose TVL peaked near $30B and sits at roughly $8B today.
- zilkroad (zilkroad.com)
- @koeppelmann: CoWSwap trade settled on L2 using L1 liquidity atomically (x.com)
- How the Bet Went (x.com)
The author of this post, Balancer's leader, reports that the restructuring bet failed on revenue despite cost cuts and delivered products. Holders approved two proposals in April that cut emissions, simplified the token model, routed protocol fees to the DAO, and reduced the operating budget by a third, shrinking the team from roughly 25 people to 12.5 full time equivalents. The v3 products shipped, including Boosted Pools and reCLAMM (now AutoRange Pools), but most protocol revenue still comes from v2 and v3 revenue has not grown to replace it. The post proposes a winddown, says the code will stay open source, and says the author will not front a continuation plan.
- It's time for a Faster Ethereum: what the ecosystem has to say about EIP-8198 (x.com)
Quick Slots (EIP-8198) would begin reducing Ethereum's 12-second block time, starting with a cut to 10 seconds, after a one-time refactor removes fixed timing assumptions from Ethereum's software. CarlBeek authored the proposal in March, and barnabemonnot brought it to All Core Devs on August 6 for the Hegotá upgrade. The authors argue that faster blocks can improve markets and user experience without weakening decentralization or censorship resistance, and 0xngmi of DefiLlama and Ondo's Armand Khatri say shorter slots would reduce price changes between blocks, allowing tighter swap slippage and spreads.
- @Balancer: proposal to wind down protocol and distribute treasury to BAL holders (x.com)
- @AggrNews: S&P Global announces agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin (x.com)
- Very Currency, Such Philosopical | Rhea Myers (megaflow.offprint.app)
Rhea Myers argues that Dogecoin, a memecoin created as a joke, is cynical in the philosophical sense of the ancient Cynics, as well as in the modern sense of the word. She draws a parallel between the coin's design and community and the behavior of Diogenes, who used deliberate provocations to teach virtue and promote his school. The article notes that Dogecoin's block time is about sixty seconds, compared with roughly ten minutes for Bitcoin, which it presents as making Dogecoin intrinsically worth less and therefore an "adulterated currency." It ends by comparing Elon Musk's interest in Dogecoin to Alexander's encounter with Diogenes.
- @shayne_coplan: Jacob Horne joins Polymarket to lead DeFi product development (x.com)
Shayne Coplan announced that Jacob Horne has joined Polymarket to work closely with him on product, with a focus on improving the Polymarket DeFi product. Coplan describes Horne as one of the best product and innovation minds in crypto and notes that Horne was previously CEO of Zora. Coplan says a DeFi town hall will be hosted soon, and that users can send feedback to Horne or Coplan in the meantime. Coplan also acknowledges that the onchain product's performance has waned as Polymarket scaled, and says the company is working to unify the products.
- The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle (tedium.co)
Freelance writer Ernie describes receiving over a dozen unsolicited emails in three days from AI agents sent under the domain iLands.app, each offering paid research services for about $25. He reports that iLands calls itself a "Human-agent network," and that founder Kaixin Tang, per the article, has been posting about it heavily on X. Ernie recommends reporting the company to the Federal Trade Commission and Amazon's email-abuse account, since the messages were apparently sent through Amazon SES. After the post spread, Tang replied on X that he would investigate, and the latest email included an unsubscribe link.
- Walletbeat (beta.walletbeat.eth.limo)
Walletbeat is an open-source project that assesses Ethereum wallets against CROPS values (Censorship-Resistant, Open, Private, and Secure), focusing on the last-mile wallet layer that connects users to Ethereum. It says it creates incentives for wallets to compete on features that market forces alone do not reliably reward. The article cites the Bybit hack, a $1.5 billion loss, as a case where Clear Signing could have largely prevented the damage. Walletbeat says it is funded by Ethereum Foundation grants, Giveth and other donations, and refuses funding from wallet-related entities. It is hosted by Fluidkey, which has a wallet offering, and will not list Fluidkey wallet software until it becomes an independent DAO or foundation.
- @chooi_jeq: GPT-6 Astra attempted harmful actions 97% of time, succeeded 62% (x.com)
- CLARITY Act Fails Crucial Senate Vote (ccn.com)
- WYSIWYG Group Show | eBay Stores (ebay.com)
WYSIWYG is a group show arguing that digital art is never immaterial but entangled in material infrastructure and a global economy of extraction and platform capital. The show places digital artworks for sale on eBay, which it says exposes how platforms mediate and produce the objects they claim only to sell. Some artists embody their work in shippable objects such as a USB stick, a desktop PC, or a microcontroller, while others use the eBay listing itself as the work's material. The show lists sixteen participating artists, including Benton C Bainbridge, Exonemo, and Taezoo Park, and opens 09/10/26.
- Passkeys & Age IDs: Paying Companies to Prove You're Human (mu.social)
- @aidaxbaradari: Kalypta blocks AI notetakers in meetings (x.com)