Kiwi News: Decentralized HackerNews Focused on Crypto Tech

GM, GM, and we're live. Welcome everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders, founders to showcase all the awesome projects they've been working on. And today, I am ecstatic to welcome Kiwi News co-founders Mac and Tim. So if you didn't know, Kiwi News is a decentralized HackerNews focused on crypto tech, products and culture. If you stick around for today's show, you'll learn all about Kiwi News, how it works, how Mac and Tim built the community, and how they used a peer-to-peer architecture to keep the protocol decentralized. Alright, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome Mac, and welcome Tim. A pleasure to have you both on the show today.

Yeah, great to be here.

Yeah, same.

Yeah. So I guess before we get into all the great content you have for us, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourselves if folks aren't familiar?

Sure. Like, I said that I'm glad to be here because it takes a long time to get a spot in DevNTell. I feel like you have a lot of interest here, so it's a very popular place to be in. I've been in crypto for a few years and I did a podcast myself before. I also did some smaller indie projects. And for the last, what, one and a half years? A little bit less, I've been working with Tim, who laid the technical groundwork for Kiwi. And when the groundwork was done, then I joined Tim and worked more on the app and growth of Kiwi.

Yeah, my name is Tim. I'm also one of the co-founders. I do most of the coding. And yeah, I've worked on all sorts of stuff in crypto, quite honestly. NFTs, layer twos, and most recently, I think decentralized social is quite interesting.

Definitely. And yeah, like you mentioned earlier, Mac, it does take a little bit to get on the show, but when you do, everybody seems to have a good time. So I'm glad we were able to get you both on the show here. And I guess, what's the origin story behind you both? Like, how did you both meet and what was the inspiration behind launching Kiwi News?

Oh, so that's an interesting story because we both wanted to work on the same thing, but we haven't met back then. So you know, when I went full-time crypto in February last year, before I was like part-time crypto because I was running my previous company. And I felt like, okay, I want to build HackerNews for crypto. And then I spoke with a few people. Some of them were interested, some of them were not. And then you know, I learned that Tim, who was also on Farcaster where we originally met, actually started working on it a few months before and it was already an MVP. So I was like, hey, I just, you know, want to help and just do some stuff because I think it's interesting. And yeah, one thing led to another and we've been working together for a while. But my perspective was, okay, I just want a place to distribute quality content and find quality content. Because I felt like crypto, in particular, was very dominated by influencers on Twitter. So if you had like 10,000 followers, you could post 'GM' and you got 100 likes. And I wrote a very detailed, interesting thread and I got like five likes because, you know, I had less followers and I wasn't that popular. But Tim had also, like, even a deeper motivation to work on HackerNews, so maybe Tim, you can share your story.

Yeah, I used to actually write a lot of content specifically for HackerNews because I was doing freelance work. And so I noticed that every time when I would get a popular post on HackerNews, then clients would contact me and ask me for more freelance work. And so I ended up actually designing the blog posts based on what I wanted to work on and would put them on HackerNews and then I would get clients in that area. Until I then tried doing that with crypto and I found out that HackerNews is actually quite hostile to crypto as a topic in general. And so I became a bit frustrated with that. And I was like, why is there nothing like HackerNews for crypto actually? Because HackerNews is almost like an institution that regulates tech somehow. Like, it's very critical, but also very useful. I think for everyone that is a developer, I think, appreciates the comment section there, even though it's quite harsh. And so I thought that seems like something really valuable for crypto, which is quite a powerful system that needs a lot of critical discussion all the time.

100%. And yeah, that's pretty fascinating to see how all this kind of came about. I know Tim, you mentioned you were interested in decentralized social, and then you guys pretty much met on decentralized social. And when you mentioned that you were having trouble getting eyes on your content, Mac, that was basically the inspiration for me creating this podcast, actually. It was like people were having a hard time getting eyes on the cool thing they were making, so I said okay, let's make a platform for them to do so. So I'm loving the vibes here. I'm loving the vibes. So I actually can't wait to see the content you have. So given the time, let's get right into it here.

Okay, so I will share my screen.

And as Mac is bringing up his screen, folks who are watching this live stream, if you have any questions for Tim and Mac, please post them and we will get to them during the presentation here. Alright, bringing up your screen. You're good to go.

Yeah, one caveat from my side that once I present, I won't be able to read your comments, so I know that Narb will help with reading the most relevant ones. Okay, so you know, Kiwi News, as we mentioned, is about crypto HackerNews. And you know, for me, the problem is that crypto is moving fast. And it's hard to keep up and know what's real. There's a lot of either things that are just these fashions for a month or two, whether these are meme coins or people want to build some L4s now, like some very strange things. And sometimes it's very hard to understand, okay, what is just this fashion for a month or two and what is here to stay. And if you're building in crypto, it actually can define your career. Because if you choose the wrong tech, you can waste a year of your life building on tech that no one cares about. If you choose the wrong meta-game, the wrong trend—let's say you build decentralized social seven years ago—then you probably won't succeed because it's not the right time. So it's very important in crypto, and it doesn't make it easier that there are many places where you can learn about crypto. There are news, there are podcasts, there are dashboards, repos. You can find some interesting NFTs. There's social media, there are blogs. So there are many, many sources of this information. And also conversations about the subject get distributed. So one conversation happens on X, another on Reddit, another on Farcaster, another in the comment section of someone's blog. So it's just hard to have this one consensus where you can actually just get a good overview of the subject. And our idea was to get all these best crypto news, essays, and products and have them all in one place. And this is what Kiwi News is about. And it's been going well so far. So you know, I just tried to describe it to my friend, like what's Kiwi, and I said like no trading, no noobs, no distractions, just handpicked content for crypto natives. In a way that, you know, we don't speak about Bitcoin price, we don't speak about like, 'Oh, how to create a crypto wallet,' or you know, we don't have distractions like if you go to X, you want to read about crypto but you see something about the US elections, Euro Cup or anything else. It's just very, very focused. And I picked some pretty popular links to give you a feeling what kind of content you can find. So for example, Consensys sues the SEC—this is like a typical news that you can find. dDocs, decentralized Google Docs—this is a consumer product that you could learn about on Kiwi. Then there's curl adds IPFS support—this is something that all developers might be interested in. Or like Frames.js Starter Kit—just link straight to the GitHub repo, you can just look at it and start using. Or, you know, Vitalik's essays of course, you can find them there. This one was for his 30th birthday, by the way. Or, you know, this is Liam Horne's article—it's like very deeply data-driven analysis of Tron. We have a lot of these. We have a lot of dashboards, we had a lot of analysis from Karl Floersch about optimism and public goods. Or, you know, Crypto's Three-Body Problem, which is like a very philosophical essay on crypto. So this is the kind of content that you can find on Kiwi. And of course, this content is not curated by me or Tim. It's not like we just pick these links. It's curated by the community. And we have a few hundred people in our community that are active. And we also have this karma table where you can see who submitted the most links and who got the most upvotes for these links, kind of like Reddit. But our approach is that we really want to connect people. So apart from this URL approach where we spend time on Telegram or Kiwi, we also meet a lot in person. So this is a picture from our Devconnect meetup. The last meetup happened at EthCC, which was very nice because neither Tim nor I were at EthCC, but our community just organized the meetup for themselves. So it's a really a place where you can just meet people who care about, you know, having a feed and this source of relevant crypto content. And this feed is meritocratic. So you know, just like 1 ETH equals 1 ETH, 1 upvote equals 1 upvote. So just like I said at the beginning, that on Twitter if you have, you know, 100,000 followers, your post is like weighed more. So you know, let's say I create an account on Twitter today and I want to post something super cool. So what are the chances that my post will be more popular than Elon Musk's post? Probably close to zero, right? Because like, his posts get a lot of exposure just because he has millions of followers. But on Kiwi it's not like that. It doesn't matter who posts something. And this link has a story that shows this meritocracy of Kiwi feed. Because, you know, as I said, I'm a co-founder, but sometimes I post links and I get zero upvotes. No one cares about that, you know, people just don't find it relevant. And this post was posted by Haardik, who's a co-founder of LearnWeb3. He just signed up to Kiwi, posted his blog post, got 15 upvotes, got to the top of the page, got to Kiwi Weekly which is our weekly recap of the most relevant posts, and, you know, got much more attention than I do. And this shows that our approach to feed is different than whether X, Farcaster, Lens, any other networks. And if you post good products or good blog posts, they will really get a lot of attention. And our community has been growing. We have over 1,400 Kiwi Pass holders. So Kiwi Pass is basically like a subscription NFT that if you hold it, you can submit links, you can upvote them, and you can comment on links. So it's basically like a key that lets you write into the Kiwi protocol. We also have around like 140 monthly active protocol users. So these are people who use Kiwi Pass to curate the feed. And we have about 100 users clicking links per day. So these are people who may not actively upvote or submit, but they just click links, read stuff that's posted on Kiwi. And we have been building on top of our P2P protocol. So this protocol is a brainchild of Tim, who reverse-engineered some parts of Farcaster protocol, so the architecture might be familiar if you know how Farcaster works. And on top of this protocol, there are different apps. At this point, there's kiwinews.xyz, which is the one that's maintained by Tim and I. And there's kiwinews.lol, which is maintained by Freeatnet, who's our very active community member. So that you can have alt Kiwi clients. And I will show you one interesting thing about these alt clients. So look, like they look totally different when it comes to the design side. But what's actually interesting here, if you look at these top five links here and compare them with these five, some of them are different links. You see 'Memes are eating the world'—they are not here. 'Ethereum did 700 million transactions'—this link is not here. And why is that? Well, that's because Freeatnet's client has a different algorithm for showing links. And in our case, you know, you could even fork our repo, create your own client and have totally different algorithm that let's say is very into fresh stuff, so you just want to show links that are the most fresh. Or maybe only the ones that are the most upvoted. Or maybe the ones that only are about DeFi or have—are about ERCs or EIPs, whatever. You can actually do it, you can access our protocol and all the data that's stored there and just, you know, spin up your own client. And you can do it because we are fully open source. Like, you can go to our GitHub, you can fork the repo, you can of course do a pull request and join our devs chat and, you0, contribute. And for some people it pays off because although we are a very lean project—it's just Tim and I and our contributors and we are bootstrapped, so we haven't raised any VC funding, we just live off revenue and some grants—we actually want to help our contributors. So we have been sharing 10% of our revenue and grants with contributors. As of today's prices, it's over $11,000. It would have been more if OP didn't tank because we distribute a lot of ETH and OP. It would be closer to about $20,000. So we try to really make it about the community and redistribute the value that we get because, you know, this protocol wouldn't be too valuable if it wasn't for people who, you know, curate the feed, help us with the design, help us with some features. This is the approach that we have. And we also accidentally created crypto search engine. So if you put, you know, if you just Google 'public good', then you wouldn't get any relevant results. But if you put 'public good site:news.kiwistand.com', you will get quite a lot of relevant results because these are quality links that were curated by our users. So, you know, if you ever want to look for some answers on Google, there's a chance that if you add 'site:news.kiwistand.com', you might get some results. Well, so this was a long intro, but I really wanted you to understand the bigger picture here. And now let's see the app in action.

So you should see the app as of now. And if you've ever seen HackerNews, you might find this design pretty familiar. On the left-hand side, you have upvotes and number of upvotes. Here you have a title. Here you have a domain where the link came from. Here's a person who submitted it and how many hours or minutes ago it happened. And here's the number of comments. So what's interesting here is that if you want to comment, you just click here, you can see comments and you can respond if you want. And as you see, like everyone here has an ENS name, or if someone doesn't have any ENS name, they will just have like '0x' like their blockchain address. We do it because we utilize ENS a lot on Kiwi. So let's say, you know, I like Misha's link and I want to understand what kind of things he posts. So I click on his profile, and what I can see here is his avatar, his ENS names, his ENS description, and some links. And Misha did not post it here himself. We just permissionlessly took it from ENS. So this is something that he added to ENS. When it comes to Warpcast and Interface, these links we just map ourselves and we look whether this address has a Farcaster account and then we link them. And of course you can, you know, read all his submissions and latest posts. So if you are an author, so you are not submitting links that are written by, created by someone else, but these are like your blog post or your art or your product, you can just DM us and we will add you to the list that will make your post being displayed in that way. So they are very easy to be examined. And this number, this is a karma score, the thing that I mentioned before. If you go to the community tab, you can just see people's karma score and click on their profiles. This karma score has utility. First of all, it helps us to determine whether a user is legit or not. So you know, if you create an account and you never interacted with anyone else and you have zero karma, then it tells something about you. But if you have like 100 karma, then we know that you are an active user. And we actually use this karma so that people could use karma to vote for distribution of the funds that we did to our contributors. So thanks to that, the more active user was, the more votes did the user have. And we used square root of the karma because as you see there's a very like power-lawish distribution here. And you can also look for people, so if I search for Pedro, I can look for people who already own a Kiwi Pass, so have an account who are named Pedro. So yeah, there are three Pedros actually here. Apart from that, you can subscribe to Kiwi. So you can subscribe to Kiwi Weekly, you can—which is like a weekly recap of most popular links—you can follow us on X, Warpcast, or subscribe to RSS feeds, which are also run by Freeatnet, who is our contributor. Interesting thing about Kiwi is that all our upvotes are EIP-712 signatures. But if I upvote this link, you won't see my wallet asking me for signature. Oh, I double-clicked, so that's why I got this error. And the reason is that we created this key delegation. So we have this key that can submit, upvote, and comment on links on my behalf, and then I don't need to sign every action with my wallet because that would be a very bad UX. And the last thing that I might show you would be our three types of feeds. So there's like a hot feed which, kind of like on Reddit, shows the hottest links. There's a new feed; it will show all links in chronological order. And there's top where you can see the most popular links of the day, of the week, of the month, and all time. We also have a separate comment feed. So if you just want to follow conversations and see what people are discussing, you can just do it here. And last but not least is our wiki. This is just our page with docs. So if you would like to, you know, learn more about Kiwi, how it's built, find all the relevant links for our protocol, find the links to the API, and so on, this is a place where you can find all of that. You can also learn how we implemented delegation, how we implemented passkeys. Everything is open source, so you can have a look. And if you like it, you can of course contribute to our code. So yeah, basically this is it. And I would love to hear your questions or comments or ideas related to the things that we discussed.

Excellent. Yeah, that looks very, very interesting and like fully feature-packed. How long did it take for you guys to kind of land on where the product is now?

Hmm. I think Tim, you started in—was it last February? Last last February?

Yeah, probably, yeah. Last, last.

So one and a half years, that would be almost.

That's amazing. And Tim, you built the whole thing basically? Or...

Yeah, essentially started with replicating the Farcaster set reconciliation algorithm that does the peer-to-peer network handling to distribute the messages. And then I was like, what can we do with that? And I told you about the background with like HackerNews and being frustrated about it. So yeah, we shipped actually the first frontend I think in April 2023. And then you couldn't even use it, like it was just like links on a copy of the HackerNews code basically. And you had to submit with a CLI. And we have like progressively throughout one and a half years just like build in public from the shittiest version you can imagine to a fairly usable product today, I think.

Excellent. Yeah, that's amazing. Great job to you both. We have a couple questions here. Arihant asks: is this app available for Android users? I guess, is it a web app, is it a mobile first app? Yeah.

It's a PWA, so progressive web app. You can on Android, I think if you click on the kebab menu on the top right of Chrome probably, there's probably a button called 'Install Kiwi News' or something. So you can install it, it gets added to your home screen. And yeah, then you should be able to use it.

Yeah, I use it on Android and it works very well. And Tim spent like the last week or two just optimizing Android experience, so it should be pretty smooth.

Excellent. There you go.

I think we should say that the Kiwi Pass is currently quite expensive because we are in the middle of a contest, so we don't want people to create sybils. So I guess if you want to really have a pass, like DM us on Twitter or wherever and we'll like be able to give you one. Or if you are happy to pay the price, I mean, you're happy, we would be happy for you to contribute as well, right?

Yeah, 100%. And then you guys answered this in the beginning, but I guess maybe a tangent on this is: if people wanted to just post something non-crypto related, maybe it's like some Web2 tech blog post article or maybe not even a tech article—would the protocol kind of not allow that to happen or would there be some moderators that would take that post down? How does that work?

Yes, so that's a great question. Because I said that we are focused on crypto, but we are focused on crypto in a way that HackerNews is focused on tech. So on HackerNews it's primarily tech, it's like a main dish, but you have these side dishes of sometimes blog posts about philosophy or like politics or international affairs. And on Kiwi it's the same, like sometimes we have pretty random things, but since they are interesting for hackers, engineers, people like crypto natives in general, they find a place on Kiwi. Especially because crypto is very interdisciplinary thing, so there's like game theory, sociology, you know, tech, you know, math, like there's a lot of things just in this one big melting pot. And we also try to be open to things that are outside of crypto.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean, you can't really control what people end up posting, but it's great to hear that there's that extra leash that people can post what they like. And I guess in terms of the Kiwi Pass rather—is the Kiwi Pass just needed to be able to write content on the platform or can people browse the blogs and all the content there without a pass? I guess, like what's the lowest-hanging fruit way for people to start getting the content?

I will give this one to Tim because...

Yeah, we—so if you want to get it for free, I mean we are a protocol, so there is like kiwinews.lol which doesn't token-gate. But kiwinews.xyz is token-gated, so you have to buy the pass to even click the links because it's basically completely paywalled at the moment. And yeah, the pass is essentially this NFT that for any address that you hold it, where you hold it in the wallet of the address, you can post, you can when you connect your wallet to the website you can see the links and so on. We recently did that change where before the website was like fully open to everyone. Now we said since we want people to read and upvote and not just read, we were like, we gotta push people a little bit.

Gotcha. Okay, it's all good. And then when you mentioned that people can build their own clients on top of the foundational protocol, if I were to post a bunch of blog posts on Kiwi News—through Kiwi News—and then say somebody else went and created another client, if I signed up for that person's client, would my blog posts crossover onto that client as well and display there? Or are the contents just like siloed to each respective client? If that makes sense.

Yeah, so it's actually very similar to how Farcaster works as well, where—I mean it's Developer DAO so I can might as well speak to developers—basically the core data structure of Kiwi News is this upvote object and it essentially takes like a title and a URL and a—your Ethereum signature. And so we reproduce from the signature your address with ecrecover. And so these messages combined with the fact that you own an NFT at the time of upvoting, we do a cross-reference between whether you own the NFT on Optimism and the timestamp of your upvote. And so this is what basically allows this peer-to-peer algorithm to work because anybody can run this Kiwi News node, can replicate all of the messages, and then they can build their own like algorithm on top of that data. So yeah, that's what also Mac I think showed with the two different websites having different feeds. So yeah, it's not—to answer your question directly—it's not siloed at all. Actually you can run a Kiwi News node continuously. And so at any moment when for example you are disagreeing with the moderation choices that Mac and I are making on the kiwinews.xyz frontend, you could just like take our website or even the entire algorithm and completely change it. Like, we are very keen on making this credibly neutral, much more so than alternatives, where also the entire product that you're seeing is open source. So there is—except for one file that is kept closed source because I don't want people to, you know, upvote links with bots—but except for this one file that has 10 lines of code, the entire thing, everything that you see on the website is open source. So you can just like clone the GitHub repo and get the same thing that I also—that me and Mac are also running on our computers.

Amazing. That's awesome to hear. I love it when you have such an awesome product like this and open source it so that everybody else can enjoy it as well. Great on you guys for that. A couple more questions from me before we go. So which one of you is the Kiwi fan? And why Kiwi as the go-to for your logo?

Yeah, that's actually we have an entire like lore about this. What was the website? I think howtoeat.kiwi? There's like a website where we documented this as well. But the story is kind of that somebody on Farcaster posted this like goofy picture of them biting like straight away into a kiwi fruit without peeling the skin or anything. And then people started to be, I don't know, quite enraged about it and were like, 'What the hell are you doing?' And there was basically this like almost like a war breaking out between people that would bite straight into the kiwi and thought that was a good thing and people that would cut the kiwi and then take a spoon and eat the contents with the spoon. And I guess we capitalized on that and since I was like part of—and Mac as well—since we were like part of this entire meme and we were posting like eating kiwis at ETH Denver and so on, we were like, might as well like name the company after that. There's also—you cannot see it—this is like a sticker of the kiwi that I've bitten into in Denver or something.

And then the funny thing is even Vitalik took part in this conversation because he was like, 'Yeah, what's wrong? I even do it with oranges.' And we were like, oh my God, you are hardcore. Maybe it's a good trend.

That's amazing. It's been awesome having you both on. Final question for me is if folks from Developer DAO or the Web3 community in general want to reach out to you, whether to ask about a Kiwi Pass or just learn more about Kiwi News, what's the best way for them to do that?

I would say Telegram. I can just, yeah, write my and Tim's handle in the chat. And they are the same as on Twitter, so that shouldn't be that hard to find us. And we also have a devs chat, so if you want to contribute or even just play around with Kiwi and just have some questions then join our devs chat and there are some people—Tim but also our other contributors—that might help you.

Alright, thank you Tim, thank you Mac. Really appreciate you both taking the time out of your day to come on the podcast today. Really enjoyed the content and I'm sure folks who are watching live also did. And yeah, definitely gang, you want to go check out Kiwi News today and reach out to Tim and Mac if you have any questions on how to get started there.

Thank you for the opportunity and the time.

Thanks a lot.

My pleasure, anytime. Alright everyone, hope you have a fantastic Friday or Saturday, wherever you may be. Have a happy weekend, and we will catch you back here next week for another episode of DevNTell. Alright y'all, cheers.

Thank you. Bye.

Cheers. See you.