What is Kiwi?

Kiwi is a project built from two parts

1. Kiwi Protocol: a P2P protocol for building HackerNews-like (& in the future - Reddit-like) apps.

2. Kiwi News app: an app built on top of Kiwi protocol, focused on finding and sharing top crypto content with 1,200+ monthly readers and 150+ community members curating the feed

Kiwi news app lets users submit and upvote crypto-related links so that we build a community-curated crypto feed. Users are identified by their ENS names.

As you can see from the links above, at Kiwi News we cover all crypto-adjacent subjects that a smart curious crypto engineer might find interesting - from tech, through economics, game theory, and sociology, up to culture and growth.

Kiwi community reads hundreds of sources per month. Some of them are big news and mainstream Vitalik essays. But some of them are fresh, niche essays found at the edges of the Internet. Thanks to that, our readers don't need to scroll Twitter for hours, hoping they’ll find some valuable content. If it really matters, they can find it on Kiwi.

Since Kiwi makes curating links a social thing, you could argue that it’s a social network built on top of ENS. Just like on Instagram the Proof of Work is sharing photos and on Pinterest it’s curating nice designs; on Kiwi it’s curating good crypto-related links. Although Kiwi is still a relatively small project, we already have some very enthusiastic users:

Everything: front-end, back-end, and protocol are 100% Open Source. We also decided to refrain from taking any VC funding so far to keep the project credibly neutral.

Why Kiwi built a separate Protocol

If you use HackerNews, you are subject to their (sometimes unclear) moderation rules. Same with Reddit, where you can spend years building a community that doesn’t belong to you.

Kiwi Protocol solves these problems - since links (plus, in the future, comments) are stored on the protocol level - if people have different visions for the UI or moderation than us, they can build alternative apps.

Just like OpenSea, Blur, and LooksRare are different apps to access your NFTs, you can have different apps accessing the same Kiwi content. With different designs, different filtering (e.g., NFT or DeFi only) and different moderation rules.

The client on the left has been built by Tim & Mac (kiwinews.xyz), the client on the right (kiwinews.lol) has been built by our contributor - freeatnet. They both access the same links but have different UIs and moderation rules.

Protocol design also lets devs permissionlessly build apps on top of Kiwi - just like kiwisearch developed by matallo.

How does it support the ENS ecosystem?

Crypto social networks such as Lens & Farcaster created their own name services since their use cases are pretty different from ours.

But in Kiwi, we decided that we wanted to make ENS a primary tool to identify users. We believe that it’s the most universal identifier - shared among the most crypto people.

User’s profile: Kiwi uses ENS names, pulls data from ENS & displays ENS avatars

Thanks to that design, Kiwi users are incentivized to get their ENS names, set up their ENS avatars and descriptions (That’s what made me set up my ENS avatar btw).

We are also researching ways so that the karma could be accrued by the ENS, not the wallet address. Thanks to that, even if our user’s wallet gets hacked, they could retain their karma, which would increase the utility of ENS.

In the future, we believe that “Kiwi karma” could be used as part of people’s reputation in tools like Gitcoin Passport.

Our Roadmap

Since we started quite recently (in April), Kiwi is still a pretty small app - we could argue that it’s just a web3 HackerNews. But our plans are ambitious.

Lately, we pulled off howtoeat.kiwi campaign in partnership with Base, where we immortalized the Kiwi meme onchain

Last week, we made the first step by transitioning to Optimism and modifying our pricing, which will help us scale.

Till the end of the year, we are planning to add comments, which will turn Kiwi into a more social network-like app. We also plan to add “subreddits,” which would effectively turn Kiwi into a decentralized Reddit.

We believe that these two features could 5-10X our number of users, which would also be good for ENS since we are using it as a central identity service.

Grants received so far

• Impact Gift from a Ethereum Foundation member - 2000 USD

• Purple Retroactive Grant - 1 ETH

• Gitcoin - 1076.98 USD from 247 contributors

Team

Tim Daub is a developer with 10+ years of experience who has been in crypto since 2015. His previous projects range from creating a precursor of NFTs through wallets, rug pull index, and music NFT indexers.

Mac Budkowski is an entrepreneur with 10 years of experience. His previous projects range from bootstrapping and selling a marketing agency, creating one of the most popular founders & devs-oriented web3 podcasts and co-creating an open-source faucet that shared 20,000+ GoerliETH with crypto devs.

Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio

GitHub - https://github.com/attestate/kiwistand

Kiwi Ecosystem overview - https://github.com/attestate/kiwistand

Explanation how our Protocol works - https://attestate.com/kiwistand/main/protocol-guide.html

Why kiwi - howtoeat.kiwi