Kiwi News: Decentralized HackerNews Focused on Crypto Tech
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About This Episode
This episode of DevNTell features Mac Budkowski and Tim Daub, co-founders of Kiwi News, a decentralized and open-source platform similar to HackerNews but focused exclusively on crypto technology, products, and culture. The founders discuss the platform's origin—born from a desire to escape the influencer-dominated feed of Twitter and provide a credible, meritocratic venue for high-quality crypto discussion. They elaborate on the technical architecture, which uses a P2P protocol based on Farcaster's reconciliation algorithm, allowing for permissionless data replication and the existence of multiple independent clients. The app utilizes ENS for identity and gates submission and voting rights via the Kiwi Pass NFT to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio and prevent sybil attacks. The founders also highlight their community-first approach, sharing 10% of project revenue with contributors.
Key Takeaways
Kiwi News serves as a 'HackerNews for crypto,' aiming to curate deep tech discussions away from social media noise and influencers.
The platform is built on a decentralized P2P protocol inspired by Farcaster, allowing anyone to run a node and replicate the curated data.
Curation is meritocratic: one upvote equals one upvote regardless of a user's following on other platforms.
Multiple clients exist (e.g., .xyz and .lol), demonstrating how different algorithms can interpret the same underlying decentralized data.
Participation is gated by the Kiwi Pass NFT to mitigate sybil attacks and ensure quality curation by invested community members.
The project is open-source and bootstrapped, with a commitment to sharing 10% of revenue and grants with active contributors.
Kiwi News effectively acts as a high-quality crypto search engine when users use the 'site:' operator on Google for curated topics.
Featured Guests
Mac Budkowski
Co-founder of Kiwi News
Tim Daub
Co-founder of Kiwi News
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