1.2

Welcome to (anon), a smooth round pellet of mildly competent news-gathering in a sea of unmitigated editorial diarrhea.

Now this is rich! That orgy of inanity known as ApeDAO, the decentralized, Discord-based community undergirding the “Bored Ape Yacht Club,” has voted overwhelmingly in favor of using its treasury funds to finance an existing and apparently popular Bored Ape-specific news site, The Bored Ape Gazette (italics mine), which provides news and analysis on “all things ape.” The decision was ratified through a referendum on an “ape improvement proposal” (christ!) that received 1.1 million votes in favor and a paltry 149,000 against. With a $150,000 runway, sole ape correspondent Kyle Swenson will receive a monthly stipend of $7,000, an expenditure which will be justified by such groundbreaking reportage as “10KTF Holders May Be Eligible To Claim $Ape Coin Starting August 6th. Find Out More,” which is just as tedious and illiterate as you might expect. Nevertheless, Kyle assures the waiting world that he prizes “objective reporting”—the Apes are paying him $7,000 a month for his blogging contract, so he would say that, wouldn’t he? Perhaps disillusioned with coverage of its “community” in the mainstream rags, ApeDAO is trying to style itself as some kind of savior of the ape-adjacent arts—a Medici-like patron of self-aggrandizing press releases about gorillas. How Swenson, a former campus newspaper scribe, will be able to find enough relevant “news” to honor his vast monthly remuneration remains unclear. Shoot me in the head because I am so jelly?

Another seismic DAO vote: Aave DAO, behind Defi lender Aave, recently voted through its own “AIP” (not another ape improvement proposal! lol) to launch an Aave-based stablecoin that will be christened GHO. Similar to DAI, kinda, GHO will be minted against collateral, in the form of a “diversified set of crypto assets,” posted on the Aave protocol; GHO borrowers will continue to receive interest on their deposits. Lovely!

For some, the proposal surfaced fresh, hellish memories about another DAO-governed stablecoin, Terra, which lost its peg and subsequently plummeted to a non-lucrative zero this year, costing investors billions of dollars and initiating the collapse of half the crypto market. Proponents were quick to stress that GHO wouldn’t suffer the same fate: While Terra was “backed” by another token, Luna, whose own value was grounded entirely in investor confidence (which quickly shattered), GHO will be overcollateralized—that is, the value of your deposits will have to always exceed the amount of GHO minted, an insurance against any collapse in the underlying asset’s value. Supposedly.

Here’s an NFT company—no, it’s not a DAO but it plans on converting into one—that uses revenue from NFT sales to buy parcels of land in the Amazon rainforest to “save the land” and “take care of it,” according to its PR. Honorable intentions but apparently there’s already an indigenous tribe in the very same area that Nemus, the NFT company, has put up for sale! (Apparently without any legal basis whatsoever.) The tribe is laying claim to the land and pushing back against Nemus’s efforts to democratize access to rainforest wealth through tokenomics or whatever.

A new DAO is bursting onto the scene and they call it “CULT DAO.” According to this piece which is almost definitely sponsored by the DAO (maybe it was written by our esteemed Ape Gazette colleague?) Cult DAO is “making waves in financial sectors on a global scale.” Further, the article reports, “their DeFi system is unstoppable, computer-controlled, and ready to fund the revolution.” CULT also “thrives on the idea that change has to happen for humanity to elevate,” and, uh, “was born out of the first transatlantic slave voyage back in 1526,” out of the injustice of oppression, of the belief that any one man could be worth more than any other.”

So what exactly in Baal’s name are the specifics of this era-defining project?

Ah: It’s a governance token entitling holders to trading fees which are then invested into decentralized projects of the DAO’s choosing. Smart-contract enabled venture capitalism, basically—and, clearly, a way to finally redress the injustices of the slave trade.

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Thanks for tuning into (anon), the worst thing to come out of cryptoland since that other thing a few hours ago.

—TinySchmancer