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Hey friends 👋
I really enjoyed writing the last newsletter and I could hardly wait to write another… so I decided not to! After all, I make the rules here 😉
No but really, there’s lots of cool stuff happening and I thought it would be better to send a bonus issue than wait all the way until March.
First things first, depending on where you’re reading this right now, you may or may not have noticed that I’m now posting the newsletter to Mirror as well. I heard from several people on twitter and Discord that they prefer to consume content on this crypto native platform and so I’ve decided to give the people what they want.
As an added bonus, subscribing to notifications on Mirror will also alert you when I release new blog posts. Those of you who are reading on Substack, needn’t worry though as I’ll announce any new posts in the newsletter anyway so you shouldn’t miss a thing.
Oh and by the way, on Mirror you can collect posts as NFTs as a form of patronage and as a way to build a cool little curated collection of digital memorabilia. All of this is done on the Optimism network meaning you don’t spend a ton on gas.
If you want to learn more about Mirror and Optimism, check out the recommendations at the end of this newsletter.
Speaking of Optimism
You might remember that back in May of last year, claims opened for the Optimism airdrop. Users who’d been priced out of Ethereum (and bridged to other networks), those who’d actively participated in DAO governance, those who’d supported public goods on Gitcoin, and of course those who’d used Optimism with any frequency, were all entitled to a claimable airdrop of OP tokens.
In case you never checked, you can do so here (but as a general rule, don’t trust airdrop links from strangers. You can and should verify via their official twitter account: @optimismFND).
One thing that made the Optimism airdrop so special is that it wasn’t the optimism airdrop, it was an Optimism airdrop. As in one of many. That’s because Optimism is made up of a number of OG Ethereans who believe in experimenting to find the best version of protocol design and governance.
And since most token governance trends plutocratic, which is just a fancy way of saying that it’s easily controlled by the wealthy, the Optimism Collective intends to experiment not just with how they distribute the tokens, but with how they distribute the voting power.
The way they hope to do this is via a a system of two houses: the Token House (aka OP holders) and the Citizens’ House which will be made up of individual holders of SBTs (soulbound tokens; a form of non-transferrable NFT).
Now that we’ve had a little history lesson about the first OP Drop, you’re probably wondering why I even brought this up. The answer to that question was a surprise even to me.
Last Thursday (February 9, 2023), OP Drop #2 took place 🪂
I was in the middle of the weekly PoolTogether Community Call, when all of a sudden a number of the people on the call (many of whom, like myself are active Optimism users) started to receive the airdrop and post about it in the Discord thread.
Soon thereafter, we found the official announcement from Optimism.
Now, there were a few interesting features about this airdrop. Firstly, it was a direct airdrop meaning there was no claims page. Users who qualified simply received tokens directly to their wallet.
This is actually why I mentioned above that you should never trust a random link to an airdrop. Scammers immediately took advantage as the news spread and set up fake claims pages. That’s why you always want to double check the official communications channels for a project before clicking anything.
I’ve endeavoured to create a safe environment for you so you may choose to click my links, but if you want to follow best practices: take the information I’ve given you (there was an airdrop) and do your due diligence (check official channels, read official communications, follow official links). And as an added bonus, you might want to consider an app that provides plain language descriptions of the transactions you’re about to sign. I’ve been experimenting with Fire lately, but I’ve also heard that Rabby is good.
The second thing that was unique about this airdrop was that it was quite small. Most users got around 15-60 OP. The main way to have earned a higher airdrop was to have delegated your OP’s voting power. This could mean delegating to an active delegate like the PoolCollective or to an individual like Polynya, or even delegating to yourself. Yes, you can do that!
Just make sure to consider whether you will actually participate in the governance process or whether you’d be better suited to delegate to someone else who will. Have a look at their delegate statements, check their vote history if you like, and remember you can redelegate at any time.
And now that I’ve shared some alpha…
Let’s Talk About Me
Friends, this will be my third year writing content. What started as a little personal finance twitter, turned into an interest in demystifying DeFi, and eventually an obsession with every aspect of blockchains and human coordination.
I’m so grateful for the friends and the fans I’ve made along the way, and I’m especially grateful for the communities who’ve welcomed me in and the protocols and companies who’ve funded my content.
You know this really all started in 2021, when I wanted to make some content about PoolTogether. I became enamoured with the idea of prize-linked savings accounts after I saw an interview with PoolTogether co-founder Leighton Cusack and I knew I had to try it and make some content for my fans.
Back then I was so broke, it was crazy to think I ever considered writing about personal finance when I couldn’t spare a few dollars to play around in DeFi. So I put out a tweet saying that if enough people supported me on BuyMeAcoffee (all I needed was $100, I declared), I’d use all of the money to explore PoolTogether and make a youtube video about it.
Low and behold, Leighton himself supported. And so I made the video and in the process discovered that I really enjoy making video content—almost as much as I enjoy writing.
Soon after that, I was encouraged to apply for a grant through the PoolGrants program and I was accepted. From there, I met folks from other protocols and DAOs and got other grants and sponsorships, and when Layer3 launched their (now-retired) bounties program, I entered every contest I could and won many of them.
It was a whirlwind that helped me pay down my debt, reinvest into my content creation and investments, pay a lot of taxes, and even go on a small vacation.
Unfortunately in 2022, coming off a year high highs, the market started hitting low lows, and basically every DAO stopped paying creators. I still have a twitter inbox full of projects that offered me work (mostly unprompted), and then left me on read abruptly.
Fortunately, I’ve remained an active member of the PoolTogether community all this time, so when I recently reached out to the PoolGrants team to look at the possibility of a grant for some new content, they took the call.
I didn’t get a grant however, this time, instead, I am proud to announce that I have joined the community Growth Team.
Now this is not a position with PT Inc, nor is it a salaried position as part of the DAO. It’s merely a Coordinape circle which is itself funded by grants on a quarterly basis. As a member, I can submit regular content and earn a percentage of the biweekly budget based on my contributions.
If you’re not familiar with Coordinape, I suggest listening to this excellent interview from the PoolTogether Community Podcast featuring Zakku from Coordinape.
Coordinape is a really great tool for DAOs. I’ve been a part of circles in several different DAOs over the years and it’s always felt like a fair way to be rewarded for doing work that benefits the community.
Through all of these market ups and downs, I’ve been trying to find a sustainable funding model that isn’t reliant on sponsorships, grants, or Coordinape circles.
Patronage, Check!
Since the very beginning of this project, I’ve felt that the most honest and sustainable way to make money as a creator is to find an audience who believes in what you’re doing enough to become patrons.
It’s why I started my blog on BuyMeACoffee, it’s why I always include a call to action at the bottom of my posts for those who want to support, and it’s why I’ve been trying desperately to coin the term non-fungible patronage to describe using NFTs to support creators. Really, I own the ENS domains to prove it and I even posted an article to Arweave all about this.
It’s also the reason why I spent over $1000 to hire a talented artist to animate a unique NFT and profile pic for me, and then almost $500 more deploying various contracts, airdropping NFTs to previous supporters, and other contract related gas fees.
In case you missed it, I’m talking about “Hey Friends! - The Thumbs Up Patronage NFT.”
Minting this inexpensive NFT is way to support my content, get a cool reward, and potentially unlock future perks thanks to the unique qualities of NFTs (more on that in a future post).
You can mint hey friends on Zora via my beautiful new mint page.
The screenshot above shows 8 minted, but in reality I airdropped 3, so only 5 people have minted. Meaning at present I’m still around $1400 in the red (I’m only mentioning this to point out that this is not a get rich quick scheme).
…speaking of get rich quick schemes… 😂
I recently created another NFT project and it’s already minted more copies than Hey Friends!
The NFT in question is a simple derivative based on Jack Butcher’s Checks VV.
Thumbs takes the idea of verification badges only being as meaningful as what they actually verify, and takes it to the absurd with a joyful and colourful remix that costs just a few dollars to mint.
To be clear, this is an experiment. I’m playing with NFTs as a way to remix culture but also as a way to help fund my work. It’s also a way to experiment with tokenomics.
You see the original Checks was a time-limited open edition. Meaning there was no cap on the supply other than what could be minted during a set window in time. As a result, Checks, and the majority of derivatives, minted into the tens of thousands.
With such high supply it’s hard to sustain value. It takes a lot of demand, and while Checks is doing well, even the best derivatives have failed to cross the 0.1 ETH mark meaning much of the resales, when factoring in gas costs, are taking place at a loss (seriously why do NFT traders do this?) 🤦♂️
Thumbs however has a very low capped supply. Only 2500 will be minted (plus a single test mint I produced from the contract) meaning the demand needed to accrue value is comparably much less. Furthermore, I intend to use Manifold’s unique burn-to-mint feature to reduce the supply of Thumbs during future drops.
In summary, you can mint Hey Friends! if you’re an OG supporter, or you can mint Thumbs cause it’s cheap and fun, and if you time them both right, the cost of minting them plus gas will be cheaper than you will spend on gas alone using mainnet at inopportune times. But please remember…
None of what preceded, including the bit about saving on gas costs, no matter how good of an idea it may be, and none of what follows, should be considered financial advice.
Anyway, that’s enough of that! Let’s talk about something more interesting.
Artificial Intelligence, Goldilocks, and Prizes
There’s so much going on at PoolTogether that it’s the perfect time to be on the Growth Team as I would have wanted to write all the same content anyway; remember I really only write about things that interest me and PoolTogether has always been my number one.
So for my first article, I decided to cover the recent upgrade to the prize distribution mechanism. If you’ve been a PoolTogether user for as long as me, you can probably remember the way it used to dole out a big weekly prize. You may also remember that whales came in with massive deposits and swept the majority of these prizes 😪
With the v4 redesign, not only were whales not able to game the system, but smaller depositors could benefit from daily prizes to help them grow their savings in a noticeable way. Many users said that this was a key benefit of the redesign.
The only downside of this design was that with prizes going out every day, it would take a pretty massive TVL to achieve large, “life-changing” prizes. Fortunately, the devs did something and a new change allowed for a combination of both small daily prizes and infrequent large prizes.
I wrote all about this in a new post called “These Prizes Are Just Right!”
The title and the cover image are a reference to Goldilocks and the Three Bears. If you skipped that particular fairy tale, it centres around a home invasion wherein a young girl eats the food of three different anthropomorphized bears, finding one bowl of porridge too hot, another too cold, and then finally one that’s “just right.”
I wanted to try something different for this graphic so I took the idea I had of Goldilocks eating from a bowl of USDC tokens to Midjourney, an AI art bot.
I’ve done a few experiments with prompting these bots but I rarely get something that it isn’t, simply put… horrifying. This is because theses bots are trying to parse the language you use for cues of what to produce and then match it to a catalogue of features which it then blends together.
Putting aside the discussion of the ethics of AI art, I want to talk about something else for the moment: the outputs are not very good.
Here’s some examples:
Prompt: cartoon goldilocks eating a bowl of blue tokens with white dollar signs on them
Somehow Goldilocks ended up blue and the tokens ended up gold, and in the fourth iteration she was a ghost with feet for hands 🤨
I did about a dozen similar prompts/rerolls. The worst part was she always looked so sad.
Prompt: cartoon goldilocks eating a bowl of USDC tokens
Check out the bottom left. She’s so sad that her spoon broke that I can’t help but feel a little sad myself 😢
I eventually realized what the problem was. I didn’t explicitly say that she needed to be happy.
Prompt: happy cartoon goldilocks eating a bowl of blue coins
In this set, the bottom left, aside from a bizarre set of hands, was showing a lot of promise, so I clicked for more variations to be made. And then I went through many many variations.
And things got very weird at times…
I even lost faith at one point and changed to a wholly different idea and started looking on free vector sites for something more promising. But I wanted to experiment (and I knew that at worst, I’d get to write about it in the newsletter).
In the end, I did get something that could serve as a starting point.
Still, I had to fix the double nose, remove the acne (I think it was supposed to be freckles), fix the tongue, fix the lighting on the bowl, draw a hand from scratch (very difficult to do as it turns out), and then, and only then, could I finally begin stylizing it.
I used tokens that Oops created for the PoolTogether Discord, changed some of the colours for better contrast, and extended the image out from a square to a 16:9 panel. And all in all it took me about 6 hours of editing (I’m not very fast). But I’m happy with the results 👇
If you enjoyed this little walk through the creative process, you can collect a limited edition NFT of the post on Mirror.
Ok this little bonus issue has turned out to be not so little, so let’s wrap things up the way we always do.
Recommendations
First things first, near the top of this newsletter I promised a recommendation that brings together Optimism and Mirror. Here it is, in the form of a fantastic episode of the Optimism Foundation’s podcast, OP Radio
OP Radio #12: Mirror Web3 Publishing Platform
Next up, there’s an interesting look at Jack Butcher’s aforementioned Checks project.
'Checks VV' is Capturing the Zeitgeist Through Checkmarks
And finally, since you know I love a good quest, check out the Polygon DeGens campaign on Galxe. Despite it’s name, nothing you’ll do for this quest is particularly degen. Instead it’s more of a course in the basics of Polygon DeFi with protocols like Uniswap, Stargate, and of course, PoolTogether. For each quest you complete you’ll unlock an animated Galxe NFT like the one below.
Don’t forget questing is a great way to try out protocols, and those who use the protocols, are the ones who get the airdrops 😉 #NFA
That feels like a pretty good place to wrap it up.
Until next time,
Thumbs Up
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