Crypto
State of Blockchain 2022 Event
MN Blockchain hosted their annual State of Blockchain event this evening at Fueled Collective in Downtown Minneapolis. This was the first event of theirs that I have gone to and it was a good evening.
There was an hour for networking and food with a handful of people displaying projects or work they had done. I got to meet Cats Will Eat You, one of the local artists that I have been following for a while. I own Ring, Rang, Rung from him. I also got to check out Inside the Robot and Nuclear Nerds.
For the panels and presenters it started out with storage and the blockchain and a session with Filecoin and StorJ. They are each solving the problem from a different angle with Filecoin more focused on long-term archival and StorJ on distribution and CDN functions. They’ll both cross over into each other space.
Disclosure: I am a small investor in a Filecoin provider and hold Filecoin tokens.
It was really cool to see UMN Blockchain club there. The club has over 300 people engaged and an active community. They won the Columbia University hackathon for crypto.
Another highlight for me was the presentation on using NFTs for campaign fund raising. Not that I’m excited about raising money for campaigns, but I think it is a model of creating community and collective action. The highlight was that the average fund raise from the NFT was $5, but then follow-on donations from those individuals was another $250.
I noted that there wasn’t very much overlap between the technology events I typically go to and this one. On the plus side, this event was significantly more diverse on every metric than any tech events I’ve been to. I loved that. At the same time, I think it is a miss to not get more passionate technologists at these events to stir the creativity and have interesting outcomes.
I worked with the organizers to make a POAP for the event, but it was last minute and the distribution was not thought out well enough. More thoughts to come on using POAPs at events. It was also the first time I distributed a “You’ve met me” POAP, which was fun to do.
We are having a party to celebrate my Mom’s 70th Birthday today and we are marking the day with a special POAP! I used Poapathon to get a wonderful custom image to make it even more special.
The POAP for this years TeamSPS Kubb Tournament turned out just amazing! I created a Poapathon bounty and “InsertGenericArtName” just blew me away with this design.
I got my Ethereum Mainnet Merge POAP today! It goes perfectly with my Ropsten Merge and Goerli Merge tokens. Tyler got one too.
Roadmap by Dariush
I stumbled upon Roadmap by Dariush (0xDariush.eth, @0xDariush) and the project intrigued me. He’s hitchhiking from Armenia to Georgia and Turkey and from there to Europe. He is going to share the story on Ethereum. Interesting!
He’s supporting the journey a number of ways, including proposal 862 from Nouns DAO. I also grabbed one of the OG 100 tokens to support his trip.
I find this sort of experimentation interesting and am curious to see how the experience works.
Tracking active Lil Nouns DAO proposals.
Voted for Lil Nouns DAO proposal 48 “Lil Nouns Weekly Newsletter”.
Voted for Lil Nouns DAO proposal 49 “Lil Funding + Data Pod + Content Pod Refills”.
Snapshot vote for Nouns DAO proposal 142.
Ethereum is now Proof-of-Stake!
Waiting for the Ethereum mainnet merge? Make your Gitcoin grants!
I supported ENS Fairy, POAPin, Internet Archive, EFF, and ethstaker in Grant Round 15.
My grants were matched 10x! 💰 I love how you can see the direct transfers in the transaction.
Participated in my first POAP Art canvas tonight as part of the merge call. Painted my “Thing” moniker in the lower right part of the canvas. 🤩
Final Version
Here is the final completed canvas. I had to defend my pixels many times when people tried to take them over. Thing FTW! 🤩
Excited to watch the Ethereum merge happen live tonight!
Looking forward to the Ethereum mainnet merge tonight, and digging my Ropsten and Goerli merge POAP tokens. ❤️ POAP! 🤩
My Gnosis Chain home validator is spending the next day or so getting synced. The Dappnode Home i732 was relatively easy to get setup.
Signed "Proof of Stake" by Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin is releasing a new book called Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains. This is going to be launched right around the same time that Ethereum makes the transition to proof-of-stake. Buterin is donating all of the proceeds from the book to support open-source public good through Gitcoin Grants. I’m a fan of Gitcoin Grants and have participated in multiple Grant Rounds. I already pre-ordered a copy of the book.
Vitalik is doing a very interesting thing with the ebook though. You can make a donation of any amount and get a copy of the ebook. In return you get a non-transferrable NFT and when the book is published you get a digitally signed copy with your NFT in it. I’m in!
PS: The book itself is also published under a Creative Commons license, another organization that I have been a longtime supporter of. I publish my website and newsletter under Creative Commons as well
Ordered a Dappnode Home i732 so that I can run a validator for Gnosis at home. I’m a big fan of POAP and Nifty.ink, both of which run on Gnosis. This seems like the easiest path exploring home staking. If this all goes well I would like to explore home staking Ethereum.
Minted Noun Cats
The Noun Cats project was my “gateway” to the Nouns ecosystem. It is the first place where I found these projects embracing completely public CC0 licenses, and I thought the project was really fun. Over a couple of times I ended up minting 8 different Invisibles from the project.
While they were developing the project further they even created a spin-off project for Early Birbs, and I have my set of those too.
The project never “minted out”, so the folks behind it pivoted and recently made it so you can get the Noun Cats that match your Invisibles. I decided to keep my invisibles and mint the cats to go with them. The mint was only available directly via the contract in Etherscan, which I hadn’t done before. But after I crafted my API call the transaction worked fine. I’ve now got my full squad.
Ordered a bag of Nouns Coffee. Never would have guessed that to come out of Nouns DAO. ⌐◨-◨
Voting for Lil Nouns DAO proposal 22 to fund Lil Grants Season 2.
Voted for Lil Nouns DAO proposal 21 to Buy Noun 235.
Voted for Lil Nouns DAO Proposal 18 to Acquire LilNouns.eth ENS Domain. txn.