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GM GM, again sorry for the double ping last week, but it did seem some of these emails got stuck in spam, so it was worth it. As a side note as well, I am creating "communities" here in Paragraph which is a just a fancy way of saying reader segmentation. Right now, I have three communities, one is for my podcast, so that means you will get an email when I drop a new podcast episode. If you don't want that ping, you can unsubscribe from those emails and still get the rest of them. The second one is my personal blog and don't worry I didn't add anyone to that automatically, I have it at zero readers you can sign up for it if you want, but no pressure. The third one is, a new series I've been mulling over for a hot sec, titled "Cool Shit Spotlight". I will send it bi-weekly and just cover some really awesome items I run across that maybe aren't worthy of being in the full issue or I run out of space/time to include them. Again, as a reminder, you can pick and choose which ones you want to receive or not, I don't try and ping you guys too much and I move like that accordingly. I don't want this to reach the levels of @everyone on Discord lol.
The airdrop for The Beginning by MEK is complete. I've been blown away by the love for the moshicam frame, with over 30 unique mints now. Here are some examples of the frame in the wild: Ants, Johann using the drawing feature, Macvynls with the nice degen hat. I will be airdropping five editions of The Beginning to my favorite mints on moshicam. Royalties are honored and sent to MEK as well.
This week I will be dropping my latest podcast episode with Palmera. OAC subscribers already have access to this episode. I enjoyed doing this episode because Palmera is really on the bleeding edge of tech in terms of supporting onchain organizations and some of the problems they are trying to solve for are huge but I am rooting for them. The episode will drop this Friday so when you are stuck in traffic for 4th of July, you can give it a listen.
I found this tweet really interesting on where most of the NHL players are born. Canada really loves hockey and we can thank them for probably providing us most of those players haha.
Manifold announced a claim codes workflow that should make things a bit easier for artist to deliver NFTs via various methods to collectors. A great example of this usage is by Dylan Wade, who is using this to bridge his prints to his digital world.
In collaboration with 452b, Beginnings by Bryan Brinkman is a really beautiful piece that caught my attention this past week.
Farcaster Frame like functionality is coming to Twitter via Blinks. As of launch this is only for Solana apps. This is what fueled Farcaster to being a more crypto native experience and brought thousands of people over. The way this is being accomplished is by injecting HTML, JavaScript, CSS into the the Twitter app. An even simpler way of thinking about it is, if you post a JupiterExchange swap link on Twitter, this extension sees that url and instead of it being static thing, it swaps it for a frame inside the tweet. A more malicious way of phrasing this is, it hijacks the link you see to something else (thank you Samuel Huber for explaining this tech to me). I am curious to see how this will play out with folks. As always use this at your discretion and be safe. Do note that, currently desktop-only, not mobile (unlike Farcaster). Security measures include a manually maintained registry of trusted domains (similar to FC). If you're a bit bummed why its Solana and not ETH, let me just tell you that an ETH version is not too far behind. As a matter of fact, David Furlong has been at an ETH version before Blinks, with his Open Frames model which not only will support ETH identities but also XMTP, Lens, FC.
Coinbase is really doing everything it can to get the next 1 billion users into crypto. They announced a strategic partnership with Stripe to add USDC to their tools and in return Coinbase is using Stripe for those that want to pay with credit cards on Coinbase Wallet. A win win situation for both and a win for all of us.
Balaji a while back had a crazy bounty to build a crazy summary news site for farcaster and Nick seems to be the one working on this the closest with Balajis. Right now it is currently grouping these items by using Machine Learning and the next steps are to use LLMs to summarize the contents of a specific category. This has potential to go nuts and look good at the same time as Nick also built AMP which is a fast reddit like farcaster client.
I am really digging the collaborative spirit that Farcaster community brings and this partnership between Castsense and jtgi's Automod tool is a great one to see. Automod has been making great strides in ease of use and functionality and by adding context to some of the rules being applied to our channels this is a fantastic add. We can now see the impact of our choices and we can verify that the right type of people are being shown in our channels, bravo.
Sotheby's had a lot that sold this past week so plenty of art could go here but I chose my two favorites below.
PARTIAL 1A' by Jack Kaido sold for USD $38,400.
Sakura Dinner by Seerlight sold for 45k.
Some communities on Discord and Telegram have really taken their community stickers real serious. So this project, Stix, which looks to bring stickers onchain has me intrigued. I think if they can get wide usage of them, in apps we use daily, this can get sticky real quick.
American Express is one of the biggest credit card, payment processors, financial institutions and more in the world. They recently filed a patent that caught my eye. Amex Passport as they are currently calling it, are digital images that are authenticated by digital tokens. Which sounds awfully like some Starbucks i've been here stamp but on blockchain tech. Even if this was rolled out to Amex Lounges you have visited, I would have fun. But with their recent acquisition of Tock and already owning Resy, this could easily be more. Onchain proof you have been to a restaurant. And not just oh I ate at this restaurant after it was cool, but BEFORE it got cool type of deal.
Surreal is one of my favorite apps to consume onchain media and I got my eyes peeled for this announcement with Pods.Media.
As of the moment of reading this newsletter, we should have more information on what Receipts (think onchain workouts) is up to. I used receipts a couple of times but as not a heavy user of Strava anymore, I kept forgetting to check in and use it much, so I am hoping that this will change with this new version.
Been of big fan of Shakkablood and I always enjoy high quality merch and these shoes that Shakka teased are fire. From the green soles, to the pops of orange and the handstitched side logo to the jabbitz carrot on the laces.
I am not even Mexican but these hand made and embroided El Tri shirts are bangers.
Lastly on this front, I do love watches. Not just expensive ones either but all types of watches. There aren't many squared watches out there (trust me, I know) so when I saw this Nouns watch and some of the colors in came in, these are pretty nice imo.
Have a great rest of your week!
CIAHOAD-Rick James
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GM ☕️ 👽 New Weekly Recap 📥 👉🏻 @manifoldxyz dropped a new mechanism for delivering art 👉🏻 make sure to check out @bryanbrinkman dope 452b piece 👉🏻 Solana dropping Blinks, frames & actions coming to your web2. Thank you @samuellhuber.eth & @df for the assist 👉🏻 @coinbase partners up w/ Stripe 👉🏻 @nt drops crazy new farcaster news app 👉🏻 @jtgi partners up with/ cast sense to give mods context on which casts show up in feeds @jackkaido breaks all expectations w/ Partial 1A 👉🏻 American Express files new patent to keep an 👀 out for 👉🏻 @receipts V2 has me intrigued You can find more in my newsletter 👇🏻 https://paragraph.xyz/@0xgramajo/78