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Gramajo's Corner
GM, couple of things I am working on behind the scenes. I am working to get 2 Poaps made, one for everyone who subbed to 1 year anniversary of newsletter and the other for 2nd year anniversary. My reasoning is, I want them to be onchain snapshots of those readers so Poaps make sense, that way everyone gets something moving forward (limited art work + poap for all). Is it silly, probably but seems like some easy innocent fun. I will be sending an email out based on when you subbed for those that want to collect.
1st Year Subscribers, check your inbox now! From: 0773h.com and onchainaliens (yeah there is a story there)
Content I will be dropping in the lead up to my trip to Japan, Cool Shit Spotlight later this week, new artist feature with artist Coup of Grace is October 3rd/4th. I head to Japan the 7th so I will drop 1 or 2 Youtube videos while I am off. 2/4 shorter YouTube videos for the podcast are done as of this moment, you can sub here if you want to get notified when I drop them. I recently also completed a new podcast website which I think looks really nice, it can even feature your message if you send me one.
After Japan, I will come back with a vengeance based on the content calendar I am working through. You won't want to miss it as you will definitely recognize some of these artists, founders and collectors.
Also make sure to check out this weekly space I am hosting with Humpty, Pichi and TreeGirl over on Tavern, every Monday 8am PDT. Last week we had over 30 people show up.
Web3 Insights
Another day in the bear market, another company/service taken away from us. On September 30th, Prohibition will be going down. One thing that can be said about this company going down vs others is that Prohibition uses ArtBlocks Engine and is all fully onchain art therefore the support and "viewing" of any of your purchases will work and is extremely portable for a new company to inherit these art pieces. I think something that doesn't get discussed enough is what happens to your mints when marketplaces go down. Prohibition is an example of minimal to zero impact to collectors and creatives. Knownorigin shared contracts or really any shared contract is a gamble. You can see from this tweet that someone had to prepare a CSV with over 220k new IPFS links just to make sure this art continues being enjoyed by others in the future. Something to keep in mind when minting (either selling or buying).
Predictive markets seem to be all the rage right now, with the announcement of tmr.news. The premise on this is simpler than Polymarket which is predicting the title for New York Times headline tomorrow and it leverages AI as an oracle to see who is the "closest" in their guess. Really cool on my end especially with is nativeness with other apps like Daimo. Another similar market to this is Swaye, which I have spoken about before on the newsletter. I think there is an opportunity for more than one winner, with different focuses. The tmr.news one could be a fun one for the next Joe Rogan Podcast guest or more cultural events. But what do you guys think? Is this just another form of gambling that "feels different"?
Mini Apps on Farcaster are here! Ever since I began digging deeper and deeper into Telegram, I noticed there was a lot that Warpcast/Farcaster team could borrow from TG. One of those items was mini apps and it was all triggered by the FrenPet app (shoutout to them). The idea took over my brain, an app within an app, making apps stickier. Of course a full dedicated app could be a better experience but there are so many apps we all download and never open. Changing human behavior is fundamentally hard business. So as a developer bringing your app like experience to an app people are already spending a ton of time in this case it is Warpcast, is a nice proposition. Two app that have already taken advantage of this are Paragraph which is what I use for my newsletter, you can now read this whole post from the comfort of your feed (hello if you are doing that now). The other is Stories which is an Instagram Stories like app. I know Stephan has thought about building a full blown app but that is a time commitment and I wonder if that thought process has changed now that this feature is rolled out. Really looking forward to what other use cases people will come up with now that we have this functionality.
As most of you know, I a bit of a sucker for fully onchain artwork. And if you read my yungwknd artist feature, I am also a sucker for those pushing art and code boundaries to their limits or just trying cool shit onchain. With that said, Rothko on Pennies is all of these things. Numbers turned to images, in this case ETH balances of 962 wallets together all forming this Rothko compressed down and dithered, which ended up selling to Serc for 1.25 ETH.
Shape, another L2 being built but with more of an art focus is launching late this week/early next week. I don't know why we need another L2 and I do find it slightly hilarious that when SuperRare announced their L2 for art people were pissed but now people are down for this. I don't think anyone has defined what an "art L2" even means but if someone would like to define that for me, please shoot me a DM. I have some ideas of how I would define it but I want to see what others think. One thing is for certain, Shape definitely knows what it is doing. They are bringing some of the biggest collectors and matching their buying power for a grand total of half a million for art collecting at launch. I am cautiously optimistic but we could easily have most of the money go toward already established artists vs up and coming ones. If you do plan to do an art drop, on launch day you can use Highlight to drop and collect.
The Farcaster team is currently previewing a BIG change for Farcaster coming in the future. Channels are going to get revamped in a big way. They are essentially becoming a bit like a Telegram channel where you have members that have to be accepted into a public channel. Reading is public but posting is private to whatever metric the owner decides, this can be token holding, people you like/curators, NFT holders and more. Highly suggest you read the first message below if you are curious. I am excited to see where this goes and glad the team is doubling down on cozy corners. I am sure there will be some rough edges at launch but overall hoping it fixes a bit of the spam problem to channels. But it does look like we will have to go on this journey without Automod from Jtgi. Automod has been a breeze to use and got me the level of granularity I wanted from a moderation perspective so I am truly sad to see jtgi wind down his tool.
Market Insights
Seriously, some of yall need to chill. Leave some XCOPY for the rest of us. We started off the week with a 280ETH sale of Null. But if that wasn't enough, Loading New Conflict sold for 300 ETH. Of the two, Loading New Conflict being my favorite mostly because it reminds me of one of my favorite pieces which is Dissolution. Echoes of a Dead Earth (blue) also sold for 36.36 ETH and The Doomed sold for 50ETH. At this stage I am not sure what to think, I know in the past, when we have had a run up like this by X, other pieces do come down at a later stage but maybe its the bull in me, but I dont really know if we will see pieces reach attainable prices again for the common folk. But patience is always key.
Base recently launched cbBTC, which is already the largest market by volume. Which comes to show you that sometimes you don't need to create the craziest tech to get ahead, BTC still commands attention and this wrapped version with low tx fees seems to be a popular choice already. The previous BTC maxi in me thinks this is just a weird but hey what do I know, people clearly like it.
Everything Else
I am a big fan of Interface and I believe that social discovery via onchain that is still sorely lacking in the space. Interface is a great app that gets us really close to a great onchain experience when you follow people. So when I saw they were partnered an excited for the below, I also got excited as well. Will be keeping an eye on this one!
As a new Nouner, this was a fun watch this past weekend. Definitely made me excited to get involved and participate in this wild onchain experiment. I've already met some really cool people and this filmed solidify my decision even more. Worth a watch for those interested.
California ID on Apple Wallet beta open.
Solana Gameboy launches.
Louisiana State Government accepts BTC payments now.
Bcard announces support for $Nouns, which offers entryway to fractionalized Noun.
Nounswap announces a slew of features making it one of the best places to purchase a Noun.
Phantom rolling out usernames, make sure to get yours.
WalletConnect announces token and further decentralization.
Meme Of The Week
After another week of a crazy XCOPY sale this felt like the right meme to include haha (h/t to Anirvedas on Twitter)
Fin
Have a great rest of your week!
CIAHOAD-Rick James
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