Crypto
- @artblocks_io has done 5,570E ($13M) in the last 24hrs, up 401%, primarily driven by @tylerxhobbs Fidenza project
- Two CryptoPunk zombies purchased for 700 & 850 ETH ($1.72M & $2.09M). The next available zombie is 1.23KE or $3.71M. There are only 88 zombies in total
- Gary Vee buys rare CryptoPunk Ape for 1,600 ETH ($3,764,576.17 USD), this triggers a CryptoPunk buying frenzy
- I picked up a badass a 1/1 XCOPY (🏆 grail for me)
- Alchemy: AWS for Blockchain?
- Offchain Labs: Layer 2 scaling solution for Eth, solid.
- Veem: Payment solution using crypto underneath. Like Venmo.
- Bakkt: Digital wallet solution.
- Bitso: Over 1 million users, 15% of all assets going to Mexico.
- Staked: Solution to build yield off of DeFi ecosystem.
- Are getting into NFTs as well, undisclosed investment.
- 37% of crypto market is non-Bitcoin and non-Ethereum, up from 16%.
- Why has gold not done better? Perhaps demand is being captured by BTC.
- BTC at 233% for 11 years and has no correlation to other asset classes.
- If 3.5M people hold BTC, price is $700,000… possible in 5-10 years?
- China Ban is positive signal?
I joined the POAPathon this morning and got my USA POAPathon Holiday Spectacular token! The POAPathon is a 24 hour event featuring holiday POAPs from around the world. 🎄
I’ve been intrigued by NFTs ever since I came upon them. Why?
For as long as computers have existed they have made it easier and cheaper to make perfect copies of things.
NFTs represent the first class of things that are not copyable, at any cost. Truly something new.
Great Christmas tale told in a nine tweet thread.
Happy Holidays! Please enjoy this very bankless holiday tale. (1/9) pic.twitter.com/K3oj8d4vz5
— perchy.eth 🏴🦇🔊 (@TheFutureisDAO1) December 17, 2021
Quantum Mirror at REM5VR
Tammy got us tickets to see the Quantum Mirror exhibit at REM5VR. We’ve been to REM5VR many times for VR games, but this Quantum Mirror is a “transcendent immersive art experience”. It was created by Adrian Stein. We weren’t real sure what to expect at all, and I was very curious.
The exhibit is limited to 6 visitors at a time, and is experienced in two settings. The first is a gallery space with digital art on the walls, and six chairs. After a moment you take a seat and take a VR experience to “upload yourself”. The VR experience was pretty cool. You didn’t walk around, more like you were on a train going through these experiences tied to the art.
Upon completion of the VR experience you then enter the Quantum Mirror. This is a room covered on all sides by mirrors, and at a variety of angles. In the center of the room are three portrait displays playing about a 10 minute loop with audio. There is no interactivity, but the reflections are very engaging. I captured a 30-second segment of the video which shows it best.
It is with a bit of surprise that I have to admit I haven’t explored digital art with any seriousness. Surprising because we have a good amount of art and appreciate it, and I’m obviously into technology, but the two haven’t intersected. This experience was cool and made me want to see more like it.
At the end of the experience you could type a message to yourself in the metaverse. This was a neat touch but lacked clarity on where it went or what happened with it. It would have been cool for that to be somewhere on the web or folded back into the experience for others to see.
Quantum Mirror had a couple of nods to crypto tech, most notably the premier digital art you could purchase also came with two NFTs. This would have been a brilliant use for a POAP token. I was really wishing I could have gotten a Quantum Mirror @ REM5VR POAP token.
Joined the Famous Fox Federation with Fox #7164. I staked it to collect $FOXY tokens. Having fun on Solana.
Namebase Squatters
Now that I have ENS setup as well as SNS setup, I ran across Namebase (HNS) recently and found it intriguing. Namebase does something that I think is really weird, it allows reservations of names at the root of the namespace. So, instead of thingelstad.com, thingelstad.eth, or thingelstad.sol you can just get plain thingelstad. They claim to say this allows it to interoperate with traditional DNS, which it sort of does, but it collapses namespace in a way that I don’t think is workable. Anyway, I decided to poke around and was really surprised.
It turns out that thingelstad was already purchased! Now, my last name is pretty uncommon so this seemed odd to me. Even stranger, it was purchased on June 29, 2020. The buy paid 0.40 HNS which is about $0.10 USD today, and only about $0.07 USD at the time of purchase. But, perhaps this is a valid purchaser. Some other Thingelstad playing around in crypto.
I decided to look for jamiethingelstad, surely that would be available. Nope! Someone just purchased jamiethingelstad as well. The auction ended on Nov 29, 2021, for 120 HNS. $30 USD! Someone seemed to think that it was worth $30 USD to buy my name?
Confused, I looked for the one other domain I typically buy, weeklything. And sure enough, someone bought weeklything on April 29, 2021 for 7 HNS. A measly $1.75 USD for that one. This one though is actively for sale, for the low price of 395 HNS, just under $100 USD. You gotta be kidding me.
These seem too focused and I wonder how these squatters identify their list of domains. I thought perhaps people watched ENS registrations and then bought available HNS tokens, but the HNS purchase of thingelstad was a full 10 months before I bought thingelstad.eth.
I’m dissapointed with Handshake/HNS because I think it sets up a bad system when you allow people to register a name for such low prices. But even with that, the person that bought my name paid a reasonable price of $30 USD for the pleasure.
I’m skeptical of this service, so I don’t plan to attempt to get any of these names. I think the way they structured the namespace is too flat to work well. But it is still annoying. 😤
Registering Solana Name Service Tokens
I have been using Solana a good amount lately, namely for Angry Bunny Club (have 19 bunnies now). I decided to see if there was an equivalent of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) but for Solana and found the Solana Name Service (SNS) from Bonfida. SNS is not nearly as mature as ENS, and has a whole different process for buying. You cannot just buy your preferred name, but instead have to start a 3-day auction that anyone can bid on and the winner gets it. So, I started auctions for thingelstad.sol, jamiethingelstad.sol, and weeklything.sol.
To bid on the domains you have to use FIDA tokens, not regular SOL. The minimum bid is about 2.75 FIDA, or about $20 USD. The SNS tokens are permanent so you do not have to pay a fee once you own them. And similar to ENS, they are implemented as tokens that you can send to another wallet if you want.
Getting FIDA in my wallet was much harder than I expected. There was a utility on the site that claimed to do it easily but it didn’t work. I found two exchanges that had it but they didn’t allow US citizens. Finally I found Gate.io which is a pure crypto exchange that I was able to setup an account on, transfer SOL in, buy FIDA, and get it out. Very, very painfully though.
Today the auctions ended and my 3 FIDA bids were not challenged. So, I now have three SNS tokens. The specification is still very vague on what you can do with it. When you claim the auction you have to specify how much space you want for the token. I decided to buy 7 kb of data that can be stored with each. The minimum was 1 kb and maximum was 10 kb. No idea how much I will really want. Essentially, I’m assuming my “zone file” for Solana will be smaller than 7 kb. Seems like a safe assumption. Solscan has a special tab to show my domains.
I’m a fan of POAPs and have created many POAP events of my own. The ConstitutionDAO POAP is the first I decided to migrate from xDai to the Ethereum mainnet. So close… and the POAP is a fun way to remember the history.
These Angry Bunnies keep multiplying. 🤩 Had six, now eleven. My Minnesota is showing with all the plaid. Details on each NFT. Saving the last spot for a special one.
Things 4 Good on Endaoment
I had been thinking it would be really cool if Donor Advised Funds (DAF) were open to accepting crypto tokens as deposits. There has been a lot of wealth built up in crypto and it would be very beneficial to create simple means to move some portion of that to non-profit organizations. Shortly after this I stumbled upon Endaoment.
Endaoment describes itself as “We’re a tax-exempt Community Foundation built for decentralized finance and focused on social impact.” Endaoment is a DeFi version of a DAF like Schwab Charitable. This morning, while Ethereum gas prices were predictably low, I sat down to play with this first hand.
Setting up your Fund
I went to Endaoment and connected to my wallet. Easy enough, just like any other Web3 application. I then created my own fund. This was super simple. I needed a name, I chose Things 4 Good. Gave it a tagline. I then associated my name and address. There were no credit checks, no social security numbers, just basic contact information. After this I submitted a transaction that deployed the smart contract for my DAF.
Now I had my own contract associated with Things 4 Good, and it was time to provide an initial deposit to the fund. Endaoment requires a minimum $500 transfer so I sent in 0.15 ETH. When Endaoment receives the ETH they immediately transfer that to USD Coin (USDC). They sent me a receipt for tax purposes for the full value of the 0.15 ETH. Endaoment takes a 0.5% transaction fee, and there are some fees associated with the transactions to USDC, which are taken out after.
With that done, my DAF was fully established on the Ethereum mainnet, funded, and ready to use.
Granting Funds
Now that Things 4 Good was setup I wanted to try issuing a grant. The Internet Archive is an organization I have supported for a long time and I thought it would be a fitting organization to make a first donation to. I picked them off the list of organizations registered on Endaoment. This was fun to me, because this is also on-chain, so to send the grant you interact with the smart contract.
I appreciated this as it felt like a much different level of control than a typical DAF. We use Schwab Charitable and you make recommendations, they send checks, and you get emails saying it all happened but you can’t actually see it yourself. With Endaoment I can see my transaction and know exactly what happened when.
With very little effort I have my DAF setup on the Ethereum mainnet, funded, and already distributed a grant. This is holy crap amazing. 🤯
This seems like a powerful and needed capability as you manage your crypto assets. Plus it is an incredible example of the power of DeFi applications built on Web3 technology.
Deploying Organizations
After chatting with some of the Endaoment team on Discord they showed how you can deploy any existing 501(c)(3) organization. Any user can fund the deployment of the smart contract for that group. So I went ahead and deployed Constellation Fund and Minnestar on Endaoment.
Extended my registration periods for thingelstad.eth and weeklything.eth so the tokens would be upgraded to the new ENS Metadata Service. Instead of boring colored box, they now have complete metadata. See Lazy profile.
ConstituionDAO
ConstitutionDAO caught my attention right away. This DAO is forming to raise a fund to bid on one of two privately owned authentic copies of the US Constitution. Sotheby’s is holding the auction tomorrow.
The DAO started this morning with about $16M in ETH raised, and currently has $33.7M in ETH just twelve hours later via their Juicebox listing. The project was launched six days ago!
I couldn’t resist being part of this so I sent in a small amount of ETH and am waiting for the auction to claim my PEOPLE governance tokens.
What a wild idea, and all enabled largely because of the crypto stack. We’ll see what happens next! 🤞
Angry Bunny Club
I’ve been wanting to find an NFT project that I could be part of to learn and see first-hand what these are like. I wanted to find a project that was fun. I wanted something where the NFT appealed to me on its own. I wanted something that was affordable. I also was curious to have it not be on Ethereum, preferably Polygon or Solana. When I found the Angry Bunny Club it checked all the boxes.
The initial minting was over but Magic Eden is the official marketplace for Angry Bunny Club and there were a number of bunnies listed for 0.25 to 0.3 SOL. I got a couple, then a couple more, and now I have six. I had to get a Santa one. 🎅
Left to right: 338, 3069, 4801, 1308, 3680, and 3678. You can also see all bunnies in my wallet.
Like many NFT projects, the Angry Bunny Club is creating a number of different expereinces from these Bunnies, and then the community shares in the proceeds from those activities. They are working on some casual games that will feature the bunnies. There is also discussion of some publishing projects. 50% of the proceeds from those projects go back to Bunny owners.
They also distribute 50% of the resale fee from Bunny sales to holders on a weekly basis. This week that was 0.006 SOL for 6 bunnies. If that rate stayed the same it is 0.312 SOL a year. The purchase cost of the six Bunnies I have is 1.8 SOL. So if that stays flat that would be a 17% return. It is interesting to see these mechanics and to have an Airdrop land in your wallet each week.
Like nearly all of these projects it also has a Discord server, along with some channels that are only available to people with Bunnies in their wallet. There is a feeling of being in a club with others.
This is all learning for me. I picked this project because I think the NFTs themselves are fun, and the learning is just upside. 🐰
I’m a Member of the ENS DAO!
I just claimed my $ENS governance tokens and am now a voting member of the Ethereum Name Service DAO. I decided to not delegate my tokens at this time. My primary ENS name is thingelstad.eth.
This transition of ENS into a DAO has been incredible to watch. NiftyTable has a great writeup on it.
ENS is one of the best case studies for why people should care. The community now owns and governs a public good they use everyday that has billions of dollars in treasury.
ENS is leading by example how a decentralized entity can operate, provide real value, and be sustainable.
For comparison, this would be like going back to the early 1990’s and having the community involved in the structure of the DNS system.
I created an official Olson Family Vacation 18 POAP token!
We went to Canterbury Park to watch some horse racing today. We didn’t know it, but they also had Basset Hounds racing for fun which was a blast to watch.
Race 3 featured Bit Coiner. Bit Coiner won the race. An omen, HODL your Bitcoin!
After our visit to Saratoga Race Course I understood much more what was happening and how to read all the information.
Recent NFT Activity
This block of updates from today’s Modern Finance newsletter on recent activity around NFTs blew me away.
Here are some fun NFT stats from the last few days:
I continue to see a lot of potential for NFTs, well beyond just the collectible space. However, it seems that the collectibles are a huge deal on their own.
Notes from Pantera Blockchain Call
Companies highlighted:
Notes:
I’m having a blast playing and exploring POAP tokens. I’ve created a few for various events to experiment.
Bought a little more Bitclout $CLOUT to play with creator coins and Bitclout NFTs shortly. Buy the dip? I’m jthingelstad there. It reminds me of what Twitter was like when it first launched.
