The Flarnchain Newsletter | Flarnchain - Newsletter #156

Welcome back to the Flarnchain newsletter! Hope you all are having a wonderful week. Let's get things started with a quick market update.

Markets are up!

Compared to last week, markets are up. We saw Bitcoin selling pressure caused by the Greyscale Bitcoin Trust essentially unwinding due to the spot Bitcoin ETF approval, and a lot of that selling pressure has apparently dried up. It looks like smooth sailing (barring any unexpected events) in the build up to the much anticipated 4th Bitcoin Halving, which is likely to take place in about 81 days. If you'd like to learn more about the significance of the Bitcoin halving event, I'll point you towards a very nice article and countdown by Swan Bitcoin. Here's the article: Next Bitcoin Halving: April 19th, 2024 History and What to Know!

Anyways, markets have been up a bit since the last week. The overall market cap of crypto punched up above $1.7 trillion for a moment, and is now hovering just a tad below $1.7 trillion at around $1.685 trillion (after a big pullback just in the past couple of hours actually).

Market Animal

Based on the fact that Bitcoin is up around 5%, and has strongly rejected the $40k resistance level since last Wednesday, I would say we are cleanly back into bull market territory. Bitcoin is currently ~$42k, Ethereum is currently $2.2k, and Cosmos Hub is lagging at around $9.02. Since all of crypto is up by around $100 billion since last week, it's safe to call this market animal a bull ().

Note... I definitely would like to start a market animal collection on Stargaze, considering it's something I've now been doing for over 100 weeks in a row. It could be a good way to market the newsletter, since I've been terrible at obtaining new readers in the past year or more.

As we draw nearer to the Bitcoin halving, it might make sense to get into the habit of minting these market animals and listing them as auctions on Stargaze. I could include a link to sign up for the newsletter in the metadata, which might boost readership.

Milestone

Also, I'm acutely aware that this week is the last week of the THIRD YEAR of the Flarnchain newsletter. The first three years were the "Discovery" phase of the newsletter. The next three years are the "Implementation" phase. These are sliding scales, but it's important to note that next week will be the first week of year 1 of the "Implementation" phase.

What do I want to accomplish in year one?

Grow the number of holders of Proto Towers to a sufficiently large enough size to act as the whitelist for all future NFT collections on Stargaze.
Deploy the Towers NFT collection, a 10,000 multimedia collection of art, on Stargaze.
Gain enough skills and knowledge, and build enough boilerplate in my development environment to feel comfortable querying and interacting with Cosmos based blockchains via the Command Line.
Deploy the Puppy Cerberus collection, a 3,333 piece collection of pixel drawings and animations of Puppy Cerberuses.

I think if I accomplish the above four goals, year 4 of the Flarnchain newsletter will be a success. Having an append-able 1/1 collection, a massive 10k piece multimedia collection, and a generated art PFP (ProFile Picture) collection would be plenty of accomplishments for one year. I think with these under my belt, I'll have sufficient skills and experience to feel more confident designing and building towards the deployment of Flarncoin and Flarnchain.

52 Weeks of Huahua

This is the end of week 8 of this little initiative. I have obtained around 800k Huahua. So far, I have purchased some Huahua every week, according to my goals. I don't have a very robust dashboard or tracking mechanism for purchases, but a part of the implementation phase goal #3 above involves building out boilerplate to interact with onchain data via the command line interface (CLI). I think this little experiment will be a good one to hone my skills. There are several pieces involved:

wallet and key management via CLI
blockchain queries, for Osmosis and Chihuahua Chain
data visualization of the results of those queries
executing multistage transactions with a single command (this would be cool)
and many others

I think the important thing is that I actually try to push myself here, rather than reverting to the tried and true front end user interfaces for interacting with these blockchains.

Proto Towers

Proto Towers has been a great success so far. There have been 12 artists that have submitted art collaborations for the project, and so far the total amount of Proto Towers minted is 315! The collection volume has decreased quite substantially in the past week, but I think it's safe to say the rate at which I was creating pieces was just not sustainable.

The collection has almost 100 unique holders right now, which I don't think is quite enough for a whitelist to launch the towers collection. I think I'll need at least twice that many, but probably closer to like... 1,000 whitelist wallets to best increase the chances of a successful Towers mint.

I've come up with a couple strategies to increase the number of holders, but I don't want to rush into things just yet, and I also don't want to overthink things. I think the Proto Towers had initial success because I wasn't overthinking anything. I was just... making pixelated drawings of towers and cityscapes and minting them to the Stargaze blockchain. I wasn't really thinking too hard about it - I was just creating the art I wanted to create, and some people really seem to like it! That's probably something I need to keep reminding myself... don't overthink, just do what feels right.

Here's a special proto tower I made for the Cerberus DAO treasury. I was paid in Cerberus coins. In Greek mythology, Cerberus is a three headed dog who's job is to guard the gates of Hades and prevent the dead from leaving. Cerberus also had a secondary job of eating people who tried to enter who weren't dead. The only person who made it through and lived to tell the tale was Heracles.

I am super excited about the Towers collection, but I'm sort of stuck in an "overthinking" rather than "doing" phase with it. I have all of the physical art completed (that was finished back in 2023), I just need to continue building out the decision trees for the generated portions (there will be a lot of generated art) and I need to think through how all of the sub collections will be wired up and connected to each of their "master" pieces. I've spent a lot -- i mean, truly a lot -- of time thinking about this, but a lot less time testing my ideas out. Another issue is that my free time has been taken up by Proto Towers, and also the Cerberus nft collection I'm building.

Let's just say I've got a lot on my plate right now, on top of my actual job which is much more important than all of this. It's important to keep things in perspective and to remember: