Welcome to the Flarnchain newsletter! This week was... really insane. First week back in the fiat mines since the big break, so it's been a bit of a challenge to do much other than work and create art for Proto Towers, the whitelist collection for Towers, a 10,000 piece multimedia collection of towers that I've been developing for several months.
You might be asking yourselves...
What in the heck is a whitelist collection?
A whitelist collection is a collection designed to create a "whitelist" which is essentially a list of addresses that pass some sort of threshold, like "hold an nft" or "do some sort of transaction on chain". Among other things, whitelists can be used to build communities. They are one of the many tools associated with the social aspect of blockchains and web3. The social aspect is actually one of the cornerstones of any sort of crypto project, and really any sort of project at all. We are all social creatures. We wouldn't be doing any of this if we didn't live in a society.
So what the heck is Proto Towers?
Well, Proto Towers is an nft collection of pixel art drawings of towers, and it is a sort of training ground and community building tool I'm using to enhance the quality of Towers. First, as a whitelist collection, people who hold a Proto Tower in their wallet get to mint from Towers before the general public. Second, people who hold a Proto Tower in their wallet get to mint for a lower price than the general public. This serves two purposes in my mind: ensure there's sufficient interest in the size of the collection before minting, and reward early supporters of my art. It's a win win. Pretty simple.
Hope that makes sense!
Proto Towers is doing pretty good:
Since it's launch on December 23 - there have been around 150 sales of proto towers. The way Proto Towers are priced is that the price is determined based on the proto tower id + 10 STARS. However, after I started listing some, there were a few whales that bid up the price - as high as over 500 STARS at one point - I figured I should strike while the iron is hot, so I began drawing and minting more and more, and now the collection is in the top 25 of volume on the Stargaze Marketplace.
Here's the daily volume in $STARS. Note, a STARS coin, which is a cryptocurrency, is worth around $0.03 or three cents. That doesn't seem like a lot, but yesterday the volume was around 16,000 stars for this collection, which is like over $400 worth of STARS. Not a huge amount of money, but for my own digital art? It feels pretty good.
As much as I could go on and on about Proto Towers, I think I should probably move on to the rest of the newsletter.
Market Update
The Crypto Markets were doing pretty good this week, in anticipation of a Bitcoin spot ETF approval by the SEC. Today it seems maybe some news leaked that the SEC isn't going to approve, or maybe something else happened I dunno... but either way, today the markets took a huge dump, and what was once a $1.8 trillion market cap (really high compared to previous weeks) turned into a $1.73 trillion market cap... which is still really high compared to previous weeks.
Market Animal
This week's market animal is a... dang I don't really have my charts in front of me to make an informed decision, because I'm writing this from my laptop. I'll tell you this. This weeks market animal was all over the place, but I'm feeling super bullish about the Stargaze ecosystem, so even though Bitcoin is down, Ethereum is down, and Cosmos is down... Stargaze is up, and my first NFT collection on Stargaze is doing really great, so I'm happy as a clam. So this week's market animal is a BULL 
despite it not feeling that way.
You can bid on the Stargaze NFT version of this image on the Stargaze marketplace here: https://www.stargaze.zone/m/proto-towers/157 - if you've never done crypto stuff before, at least check out the marketplace, it's pretty cool.
52 Weeks of Huahua
I didn't forget. This is week 3 or 4 of 52 weeks of Huahua. I bought a bunch of Huahua a few days ago, but I don't have my charts in front of me and really it's getting very late. You'll just have to believe me -- I bought about 50k huahua. Now that Proto Towers is slightly successful, I'm going to use some of the proceeds to buy Huahua, becuase that's one of my many moonshots this year, and also because I think it's cool.
I don't really have much more energy tonight, so hope you have a good one.
Cheers!
-Flarn
