You may have heard about it, but Hyperliquid isn’t what you think it is. It’s got several factors that make it unique. For example, is it a DEX? Or is it a chain? Trick question: It’s both. Why, though?

Let’s find out.

What is Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid is a DEX, but it’s a DEX that’s built on its own chain. Most chains are built with many apps in mind, as an ecosystem like Ethereum and Solana. The opposite is true here: The Hyperliquid chain exists for the sole purpose of running the DEX. That’s literally it.

What narrowing its focus accomplishes is the ability to offer a seamless trading experience for perpetual futures contracts (perps for short), one that’s comparable to that of CEXes.

What’s a Perp? Perps let traders speculate on the price of an asset without actually owning the underlying asset itself. You’re basically betting on whether the price of something will go up or down.

Hyperliquid’s unique design also lets it process transactions at an impressive speed, keeping block times under 1 second, while processing throughput at roughly 100,000 orders per second. Compare this to Visa’s global network (VisaNet), which processes 65,000 transaction messages per second not in real terms, but at its theoretical peak!

What Hyperliquid offers as a platform

When it comes to the platform specifics, Hyperliquid has one distinguishing feature that makes it stand out from the pack:

The platform uses a fully on-chain order book. Long gone are the days where we had to rely on liquidity pools (LPs) to supply DEXes running on the AMM model. This is because Hyperliquid is crazy fast, whereas LPs are more appropriate for slower chains.

AMMs also excel at composability, enabling protocols to interact atomically in a single transaction, something order-book systems aren’t designed for. So Hyperliquid intentionally trades that stuff away in favor of fast, deterministic execution, thus strengthening its focus on delivering a highly performant trading experience.

By the way, the Hyperliquid Labs team chose to remain self-funded, which is mega-bullish because holders don’t have to worry about venture capital waiting to dump its $HYPE allocation as soon as it’s unlocked.

How does Hyperliquid work under the hood?

Behind the curtain, the Hyperliquid chain uses a consensus mechanism called HyperBFT. HyperBFT streamlines consensus via PoS + BFT (i.e., 2/3 validator approval), which theoretically affords it a throughput of up to 200,000 orders per second.

At present, there are only 24 validators. This might make you frown at first, since a lesser number means greater risk and easier manipulation potential (i.e., 2/3 means you only have to collude with 16 validators to undermine the system). It’s a fair concern. But the tradeoff is also how Hyperliquid is able to achieve the block processing speed it does.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Trading happens on the Hyperliquid chain, but the money actually moves through Arbitrum.

Why?

Because Hyperliquid prioritized ruthlessly for speed over security. The sub-1-second block times are thanks to having only 24 validators, which is a smaller attack surface than you’d want for holding millions in user funds.

So they split the risk: Capital sits on Arbitrum (which is secure as hell due to optimistic rollups), while actual trades execute on Hyperliquid (which is fast as hell).

The downside is onboarding friction. You want to trade on Hyperliquid, but you have to bridge USDC via Arbitrum first, which makes no sense on the surface.

So here’s what actually happened when I tried it: During my research, several articles pointed to how the one-click process is so simple that all that complexity gets abstracted to the backend so that the user never has to look at it. I am not new to crypto by any means, but when I tried bridging, I encountered several issues:

1. Hyperliquid doesn’t tell you how to bridge anywhere in the app itself.

2. So I went to look for a bridge, found app.across.to, and tried to bridge some SOL to Arbitrum USDC by using my Phantom wallet. It ended up hanging.

If someone with my crypto knowledge is struggling to figure this out (and it’s been doing my head in), then I don’t know how we could be onboarding the mainstream to use this app.

So far, I’ve spent 90+ minutes trying to bridge SOL to get USDC on Arbitrum. First, my mobile wallet (Solflare) doesn’t support Arbitrum, so I had to install MetaMask on my phone. Then MM wouldn’t connect in the Across app when using Solflare’s explorer.

Then, on my laptop, Across.to said I didn’t have enough SOL for fees, even though I selected 75% of my SOL balance. Then the transaction hung for 20+ minutes on “Depositing on source chain”, with no clear indication of whether it succeeded or failed.

If this is a “seamless” onboarding experience in 2026, why does it feel like the OG bridges that were clunky from last cycle? Maybe it works better from other chains or wallets, but from Solana? It’s the same bridge hell we’ve always had, just with a slightly better UI.

The $HYPE token (a token model that actually works?)

$HYPE is the gas token for Hyperliquid, but here’s the catch: You don’t actually need it to trade. Unlike Solana, where you’re constantly checking how much $SOL you’ve got left to execute transactions, Hyperliquid abstracts all that away. You just pay trading fees in USDC, and the system handles the rest.

So what’s the point of $HYPE? The fee structure is where it gets interesting. At the time of writing, more than 95% of the trading fees go toward $HYPE buybacks and burns, which means that the more traders use the platform, the more $HYPE gets burned.

The remaining 3%+ funds the validators, who cover gas costs and keep the network running. If you hold or stake $HYPE, you get trading fee discounts, which creates an incentive to actually buy and hold the token.

Staking yields sit at roughly 2%, which looks terrible compared to Solana’s 6% to 7%, but this is intentional. $HYPE has a fixed supply, so there’s no inflation pumping up the yield. The token isn’t designed for passive income, and it’s deflationary by design.

$HYPE also comes with governance rights, but frankly, I’m not sold on it. Every article I’ve read touts how holders get to “shape the future of the ecosystem,” but governance participation feels like a failed experiment across DeFi.

How to start using Hyperliquid

As mentioned, Hyperliquid only accepts USDC as collateral, specifically USDC bridged via Arbitrum, which sounds like it makes no sense, since Arbitrum is an Ethereum L2.

Sure, Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup, which presents advantages, but the word “bridge” still triggers PTSD from the early days of DeFi, when bridges were an absolute nightmare to deal with. This hasn’t changed for me, but maybe you’ll have a different experience?

It might be a Solana-specific problem, but that’s a huge red flag if one of the biggest L1s has terrible interoperability with Hyperliquid.

Anyway, after 26+ minutes of watching a progress bar on “Depositing on source chain,” I gave up. I never received an error message or confirmation. This is the exact friction that keeps folks out of crypto.

And it’s the exact problem that app-chains like Hyperliquid are supposed to solve, but can’t, because they still depend on these bridges to get capital in. The least Hyperliquid could do is to facilitate bridging from inside the app, since the greatest friction point to using their product is getting the capital in.

Implications for the future, thanks to Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid isn’t just a faster DEX. It’s proof that app-specific chains can outcompete general-purpose platforms. Ethereum wants to be everything to everyone. Solana wants to be fast and cheap for everyone. Hyperliquid just wants to be the best at the one thing it’s been designed for. And it is.

Hyperliquid proves app-chains work… if you can get your money onto them in the first place. If we can ever resolve these crippling bridging friction points, we might just see an explosion of purpose-built chains.

Maybe we’ll still have ecosystems trying to attract developers too. But there will be many apps that need their own infrastructure to be maximally efficient. A future where chains become invisible. Users won’t care whether they’re on Hyperliquid or Arbitrum, or whatever comes next. They’ll care whether the app they’re using works.

Here’s the endgame: Chains in the backend, and apps as the interface. And users who can finally stop thinking about blockchains entirely.

1. What I’ve Learned

I’ve been here a long time. I started out with ETH NFTs. Got rugged on Solana so many times, it would make your head spin. Played with JPEGs on every chain imaginable. I’ve made a lot of money, I lost a bunch more, and made it all back, only to round-trip seven figures a handful of times.

And to be honest, I got kind of sick of it. So I knew something had to change.

This piece isn't just another thesis about Ordinals vs NFTs (though we’ll get into that too). It’s about how I finally stopped trading like a dumbass, stopped chasing every shiny object, and built a common-sense strategy I can actually live with. One that involves stacking a lot of BTC and SOL. One that builds yield. One that gets me—and can get you—out of this game whole.

This is the Degen Endgame. Here’s how I see it playing out.

2. Why Ordinals Matter

I started with ETH NFTs. I even had Cardano NFTs. And I went in big with Solana NFTs—and I lost big too. All these NFTs on other chains, they made sense before we had jpegs on Bitcoin. But when that happened, it changed everything. Here’s how: Back in the early days, ETH NFTs were the shit… just like when VHS first came out. Then came the ordinals protocol, with 4k streaming. Ethereum is like Blockbuster. That shit is closed, but nostalgic mfers still linger. But lemme tell you why:

- True ownership. We can talk about IPFS pointers all day. What this comes down to is that the team—or whomever gains access to those pointers—can modify your NFTs unilaterally. You don’t have control, which means you don’t have true ownership. Ordinals, in contrast, are inscribed directly on individual sats, and the art you have in your wallet is IN your actual wallet. No one else has control. They are actually yours to keep, or do whatever you want with.

- Rare sats. Ordinal theory has made it possible for us to enumerate each sat. This means that we can track every single sat that’s ever existed, which culminates in interesting possibilities, chiefly historical, like who owned which sat when, and what they did with it. (e.g., like Silk Road sats or Hitman sats, which were allegedly used by Ross [founder of Silk Road] to hire hitmen.) We can also collect them based on what we find to be interesting. The appeal is obvious to anyone who’s ever collected stamps or coins, which I have. (Nerd!)

- It’s on the oldest chain. Ever heard of the Lindy Effect? It’s a theory that posits that the longer something has persisted through time, the more likely it is to continue existing. Think coffee. Wine. Think old stories that we’ve been able to preserve over centuries. Shakespeare. Homer. etc. We don’t know how long other chains will exist. Just look at last cycle. We had so many chains that are no longer relevant. This is how it will continue to play out. Many will come and go, but we can be sure of one thing: Bitcoin will remain. It is the safest and most secure chain. Yes, every chain has its tradeoffs, and for Bitcoin, it’s fees and speed. In exchange, we get security on the most decentralized chain in existence.

- Permanence. Since the art is inscribed on individual sats, your art, or whatever it is you’ve got inscribed, whether it’s photos, a game, what have you, is like a digital fossil, a record of the past, and you get to keep it for as long as you like. (Yes, even forever. You can pass it down—like a digital heirloom that could accrue value over time.)

Yes, most folks are still fading ordinals, and still buying NFTs. They’re not wrong, tho, not when it comes to making money. Yes, NFTs are technologically inferior… but does tech matter if you want to make a quick buck? In other words, do you want to be right, or do you want to make money?

For a long, long time, I practiced options blindness and had my blinders on. Truth is, other players with liquidity don’t give a shit about the tech; they care about money. This is who you’re trading against.

3. The Mistakes I’ve Seen (and Learned to Avoid)

Most of you will lose money in crypto. Of course, this happens on Bitcoin too. TONS of folks get wrecked buying ordinals. They get into the wrong plays, or do something lame, and then blame ordinals. (Dumb.) Here’s where many folks go wrong:

• Chasing hype without understanding what they’re buying. Bitcoin ordinals have evolved a TON since its heydays. Long gone are the days where your friends shill you cool projects, and you ape in. The marketing strategy has evolved to become almost a playbook, where projects sell via KOL shilling and wl collabs. Understand that there are many low-effort projects being promoted at any one time, and they’re ALL fighting for your sats. So ask yourself this question: Why are you here? Let’s be honest: We’re not here to lose money. If you’re here to make money AND have fun, then you need a strategy and a strong understanding of how this all works and how you can make it work for you, minus the emotions.

• FUD stops you from buying in. Ignore the FUD. If the project’s making enough noise, retards will FUD. It’s easy to have an opinion, especially when you haven’t run anything. So pay attention to who’s fudding too, because it’s most likely that they’re only known for their shitty opinions, rather than anything else. And FUD leaders will attract toxic retards who parrot their opinions. Misery loves company, after all.

• Not taking profit, and holding for the long haul. There are 2 big mistakes you can make:

1. You buy into the wrong project. (You’re a community member now.)

2. You buy into the right project, but you get greedy and miss your chance to profit. (You’re a community member now.)

Congrats. You played yourself. When you hear someone say that the best part of buying into a project is community, you’re listening to a retard. Do not forget your objective: You’re here to make money. The alternative? You’re losing money. No two ways about it. EVERYTHING ELSE is secondary to that. Community, having fun, and art are all secondary to that. Wouldn’t you be having much more fun if you were actually earning money, while hopping in and out of communities, sticking to communities you believe are goated based on your conviction bets, and buying jpegs that you actually like? (More on this later.)

• Bitcoin infighting. This is more of an observation and a side note. As ordinal enjoyers, we’re always talking about bringing in outside liquidity, adoption, and all that good shit. Unfortunately, certain toxic retards make that really difficult. I’ve read outsiders say they were put off by how abrasive the culture and ordinal folks can be, and I can’t disagree. Some of you guys are really intolerable dumb mfers who love bringing each other down. How are we going to appeal to outsiders? Not by being toxic to each other. Do you see Nintendo talking shit to Sony or Microsoft? No. It’s dumb. Sometimes we see couples fight in public, airing their dirty laundry. What do we do? We laugh at them because they look pathetic. Kinda like we look sometimes when some of you dumb mfers attack projects in public, with no real criticism or constructive feedback, but just malicious vitriol. Leave it at home, stop being a little immature dumb fuck, and keep your mouth shut if you don’t have anything constructive to add. You’re doing the entire space a disservice, while making yourself look real stupid in the process.

4. My Criteria for High-Conviction Plays

Here are my considerations for buying and selling. I have short-term buys, and I have long-term buys. But I only hold long term if it meets these conditions:

• Cultural impact, historical value. (Will it still be relevant a few years from now?) To clarify, these would be OMB and Taproot Wizards for me. I also hold Billy Restey pieces (he does interesting experiments with tech + art), Fomojis (I think they’re undervalued), Rupture (I love the art), Pizza Ninjas (Trevor is smart, and works his ass off for his project), etc. I don’t know whether all of these will be valuable, but this leads me to my next point:

• Do I like it? And why am I buying it? If I like something, I will consider buying. When I look at a jpeg, I can get a pretty accurate gauge of whether something is low effort, or if there might be something to it. If something catches my attention, I dig deeper. But also: Sometimes I like something and I buy it, even if this means “losing” money, as in, I do not hold any expectations about the price going up. Admittedly, it is more fun when prices do go up, and you buy 2 to 3 pieces, and you can offload 2 of your least favorite ones to cover your initials. Then you can hold onto your favorite for free. Congrats. You’re an actual collector, and not a bag holder.

• Supply and mint price. I used to ignore this somewhat, but not anymore. It helps me evaluate whether I’m buying into an asymmetric bet. That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions, but those are rare. For instance, Rupture’s pieces amount to fewer than 1,000, but that hasn’t stopped the floor price from descending. To simplify: Demand does not exceed supply.

5. How I Trade, for better or worse

So I think you should be getting an idea of my trading strategy by now. I scalp short-term mints when the hype + price action align. Right after buying, I list immediately at floor. With short-term plays, it’s best to do what a friend of mine advised long ago: “Live on the floor.”

I have long-term plays. You can find my wallet. It’s not hard. I hold a lot, unfortunately. And of course, I don’t have just one wallet. I have dozens. Eventually, I aim to consolidate most of them, but for now, I like having many. (I have no idea why lol)

But my endgoal is simple: stack BTC + SOL, then build yield with it, so that I can play with that yield, live off it, and not risk my principal at all. Recognize that jpegs, runes, shitcoins, etc., they’re all leveraged plays. And leverage means taking on more risk—and a helluva lot of it. That’s why, for most jpeg plays, it’s best to go in and out, unless you’re playing for conviction.

Just keep in mind that greed is the enemy of profit, and sometimes, some plays won’t go your way, but try not to end up a bag holder. (I still bag-hold sometimes. It’s a hard habit to beat, but I’m learning and practicing.)

6. A few hard lessons

I’ve been here for many years. I’ve roundtripped seven figures several times. I also lost 300k in a drain. I’ve lost so much money, it would make your teeth hurt. I’ve also made a lot of money, and I’m grateful for all the opportunities. It’s only in this space where you can make a bag and lose a bag, and still make it back—as long as you’re willing to continue playing and stomaching the ups and downs. But what’s changed in the past few months is my endgame strategy. I’ve decided to face up to my losses and assess where I went wrong. I no longer want to make the same mistakes. Something needed to change, and I think it took me roughly 9 months of sobriety to get to this point. In a way, it feels like starting over. Yes, I haven’t sold any of my bags. I still hold a big bag of $DOG. I still hold a couple BTC DeGods (lmao. Why?!) I still hold a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t be holding. Will I sell these? Maybe, or maybe I’m a victim of the sunk cost fallacy, and I’m holding in the MAJOR off-chance that they’ll move back up. Either way, I’m happy to keep those bags while executing my new endgoal strategy. It feels like I’m on the right path now, and if $DOG moves back up, great. I’ll be swimming in it. If it doesn’t, great. I have my principal I’m building up now. Either way, I’m winning, and that’s the position I want you to be in.

7. Some words to leave you with

The goal isn’t to catch every pump. Recognize that when someone tells you, “oh it’s ‘cause you didn’t hold and sold too early”, you’re talking to a special kind of bozo. There will always be another play. This is crypto. Opportunities pop up every fucking day.

So here’s what I’ll leave you with:

It’s much easier to know when to buy than to know when to sell. So sell when you’re in profit, and ignore that pesky emotion, the one that tells you that you sold too early. After all, there’s a good chance the price could go lower after you sell for profit, and you can always buy back in with your profit and ride it out with a free bag. The key thing is to keep adding to your principal. And of course, keep having fun, because jpegs and everything else are more fun when you’re actually making money, right?

— Valerioshi

Runes are here, and they’ve brought the fun of shitcoins to Bitcoin. Let’s look at how to buy, sell, and trade runes. I’ll also share a bit about how I trade runes, what I look out for, red flags, and all that good stuff.

k. Let’s get it 🤙

Okay. So what are runes? 🤔

If you already read my other piece on $DOG vs $RSIC, then feel free to skip this section. If not, here’s a quick rundown of “Why runes?”:

• The Runes protocol was launched by Casey Rodarmor, creator of the ordinals protocol, as a response to domo’s brc-20s. Basically, Casey had never intended for the ordinals protocol to be used with tokens. Folks wanting to trade brc-20s quickly found out that they’re clunky, and they clog up the network.

• So came runes, with a simple yet ingenious design. The protocol takes the op_return code—which anyone can use to insert up to 80 bytes of arbitrary data—and uses that space for runes. That way, there’s no chain bloat, and we get a novel and awesome way to have more fun on Bitcoin 👏

Now that you know the why behind runes, let’s look at a few rune tools.

Rune tools worth a look 👁‍🗨

I like to look at 3 main sites when I’m trading runes. But there are a TON of rune dapps being built rn (e.g., rune swaps and Rune Blaster, which I’ll talk about a bit below). But if I’m not using my node, the main sites I check rn are…

1. Magic Eden

2. Geniidata

3. Luminex 

• Technically, you only need ME. But Geniidata gives you some extra info. There’s also Luminex, which displays the same data differently, so sometimes you can catch something there you might’ve missed.

• Geniidata does a fantastic job of displaying prices from other sites (e.g., Unisat and OKX). ME is usually the clear winner tho.

  

• Geniidata also has an amusing seppuku chart for when Casey said this:

Here’s what the chart looks like:

• What Luminex does have: You can use Luminex to etch runes if you’ve got a ticker. We’ll cover etching in a separate piece. 

Rune Blaster 🧙‍♂️

Rune Blaster comprises a suite of rune tools. These are powerful tools, which made me take a look at the associated Wizards of Ord collection on Bitcoin.

I like investing in builders, and Lifofifo is a cool builder. The art goes hard as well, so I picked this one up while writing this piece:

The UI for Rune Blaster leaves a lot to be desired, tho, but a closer look does reveal some interesting tools:

• MagicPool shows you rune- and ordinal-specific tx’s that you can snipe.

• If you have any mint batches stuck in the Mempool, you can use the RBF tool to speed it up 👟

• Cancel Transaction is a pretty cool tool, where, say you purchased an ordinal and the collection tanked while the tx is still in the mempool, you can use this tool to cancel it. How cool is that?!

• The Sniper tool is the crown jewel of this suite.

  

  Yes, this is all of it. But you can use it with MagicPool, where it shows you a list of pending tx’s that you can snipe. So, this tool is only meant to be used as a standalone if you have the inscription ID or rune UTXO.

Thoughts on Sniping? 🤔

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have sniping, but we don’t live in that world. So we do the best we can, and arm ourselves with knowledge and tools, and get on with it. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the system we have, at least at present.

Which runes am I looking at rn?

• Let me preface this by saying that I am by no means a runes trading expert. In fact, I am very good at losing money. So take what I know, and explore, but none of this is financial advice. Having said that, I do hope you can take something of value from here, and learn, and win 🙏 

• Some things to look at when minting/trading runes, in addition to price:

  • Ticker name. Does the ticker have staying power? Is it funny? Can a culture be established around it? Is it meme-able? How meme-able? Is it cringe? What’s the story behind it? Feel it out.

  • Is there a premine? Did the etcher decide to keep 20% or so to themselves? If so, fuck ‘em. I’m comfortable with anything under 5% because I don’t want to fade opportunities simply due to moral high grounding. That said, fair 0% premines are ideal launches (e.g., $DOG and $BILLION•DOLLAR•CAT).

  • Number of holders. I like anything around 1000 and up. Too few, and you know it’s got a low chance of running (e.g., 100 holders ain’t gonna cut it. You need a wider holder base for pamp potential.)

  • Velocity of mint. Will it mint out quickly? But most importantly: Will it mint out?

  • Are there socials? What does their social game look like? Attention marketing is everything in this space. Can they command it?

Another thing to consider is fees; that is, how much will it cost in fees to mint out the entire supply? Here’s how to calculate it. (Thanks to Jason Borck and his video here.)

This data is available from any of the platforms I’ve mentioned, but I do like Geniidata; they make tracking all this data easy.

Notes:

• The god-tier runes, of course, are $DOG and $RSIC, although currently $DOG appears to be the safer bet. (RSIC’s run is contingent on their promise that they’ll deliver something shortly. In contrast, Leonidas, creator of $DOG, has proven that he knows something about attention marketing.) 

• I also like Billion Dollar Cat, Piggy, and Saiko Hamster. (I am not holding Saiko, tho, but I might buy a bag.)

  

  I am currently actively trading runes, and it’s another rune a day. Don’t be discouraged if you missed a rune token’s initial runup; there’s always the next one 🤝

• Make sure your fees are set to high. Snipers be out here 🔫. Ex: I bought $billy early, went to bed, checked a few days later, and realized it got sniped. It has since more than 20X’d. (i.e., Don’t miss the forest for the trees 🌲)

How to split your runes

Let’s talk about why you might want to split them before you sell them.

You want to do this for several reasons, but the most obvious one is that you don’t want to tank your rune token price by dumping a massive bag in one go, say a 30k usd bag. This means you’re hoping one whale comes along to become your exit liquidity.

Sure, that wall doesn’t prevent others from buying up other lots above and under it, but it’s still an inconvenience. In other words, for your convenience, you’re fucking over the community, so be a good person and split your damn runes.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Head to Magic Eden.

2. Connect your wallet.

3. Click the dropdown menu for your wallet on the top-right-hand corner.

4. Click on your “Runes portfolio”.

5. From here, you can select the lot you want to split. Click on “Split”.

6. Figure out how many lots you want to split the main lot into.
   
   Ex:
   
   You have a lot of 1000 Pussy Blaster rune tokens. You want to split them up into 10 lots of 100 each so that the listings are easier to manage for buyers.

7. Once you complete the popup, all you have to do is wait, and you’re good. Your new split lots should appear shortly.

Note: If there are any leftover runes in the split lots, they will be included in the last lot.

Oh lawd these lambo stickers pampin’ ⛽

Don’t be like Mika, and get yourself some runes. It’s the biggest opportunity in crypto rn. This is like when you missed ordinals, and you won’t stop talking about it. Don’t catch yourself talking about runes and saying the same thing a year from now.

It’s only been a few weeks.

Runes will run. And Casey’s promise of Seppuku if runes don’t hit 1 billion within the first month of launch, well, that’s done now.

Next stop: 10 billy, and Casey power level goes over 9000 🤝

It’s gotta be one of my best memories in crypto, waking up to check my wallets, only to find 6 RSIC miners sitting there. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew they were mining something. So I bought 2 more when they dipped, and held 8, of which 2 were rare.

Then I watched the price pump all the way to 0.125 $BTC, and I sat and waited as the prices went back down because I was bullish, and I figured the tokens were being mined in the meantime anyway. (Having been in crypto long enough, I also knew that provenance meant something, especially on Bitcoin.)

I ended up selling all my RSIC miners as we neared the halving, but I haven’t sold a single $RSIC token. Full disclosure: I’m also holding $DOG and $PUPS, since it’s best to hedge your bets under conditions of uncertainty.

Btw this piece isn’t a guide on runes. (Transak has a fantastic guide here.) It’s more of a retelling of my personal experience and some thoughts around runes and trading in general, since I think there are some learnings there.

So! Why runes? Let’s take a look 🤙

Why Runes?

Casey Rodarmor fathered the runes protocol. (Yes, the very same man who created the ordinals protocol.) As I understand it, runes were a response to domo launching BRC-20s using the ordinal protocol standard, something it was never designed for.

BRC-20s are fun and all, but they are a pain to manage. More importantly, they clog up the network. Runes, in contrast, use the op_return opcode. op_return allows embedding of up to 80 bytes of arbitrary data, so embedding runes does not affect network congestion in any way.

A simple and clean design.

Now let’s look at RSIC and Runestones 🤝

What is RSIC?

RSIC (Rune-Specific Inscription Circuits) were the first preminers to hit the market. Preminers are a misnomer, btw; preminers are ordinals that have a number attached based on how many runes you’d have been allotted post-Bitcoin halving (i.e., when we hit Block 840,000, which coincided with the runes protocol launch).

So for RSIC, you basically had an ordinal with a counter attached to it, and you could track the amount of tokens mined on a site like Ordiscan. In contrast, for Runestones, each Runestone represented 889,806 DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON runes, which holders received a few days after the runes protocol launched.

Back to RSIC.

In total, 21,000 RSIC miners were airdropped, with a total $RSIC rune token supply of 21,000,000,000. Below are the points that should help $RSIC rune tokens pump, as outlined by Bitcoin degen Pyroshi:

- RSIC started the prerunes meta

- RSIC didn't farm engagement; just shipped

- RSIC spent roughly US$500,000 to inscribe, etch, and airdrop

- RSIC has the #1 Rune holder count (100k+)

- RSIC wasn't based on a forced narrative or meme coin

- RSIC was first to get listed on a real CEX

The RSIC team has been quiet for a minute. They like to build in silence, and let their work speak for themselves. So will there be a Season 2 for RSIC, as was promised? Or is this a one-trick pony?

Let’s see.

Runestones: The fairdrop response

Leonidas is a 🐐. His contributions to the Ordinal space are undeniable, and anyone who says otherwise is mentally challenged. Bro is the dev behind ord.io, and he’s been on a mission to onboard normies to Bitcoin, which has found tremendous success.

Having said that, ngl I did see his response to the RSIC drop as taking unfair shots. His main criticism concerned RSIC not constituting a fair airdrop. RSIC did indeed gamify the airdrop, by rewarding ordinal OGs, while also randomizing certain aspects of it.

The result?

A ton of 🧂 poured on the TL.

Holders, of course, accused non-holders of being the salty ones, aka those who didn’t get the drop. (Fair. If you got it, why would you complain?) But Leonidas shot back: “You know what? We’re going to do a fairdrop. If you traded at least 3 tx’s that are jpegs on Bitcoin in the past year, you qualify.”

Regardless of whether taking a moral high ground was necessary—or even if a high ground was even there to take—is debatable. imo the RSIC drop was fair game. But who was I to complain? If Leo wanted to capture the narrative and work on delivering more airdrops, my door was wide open, and my mouth shut.

So I sat and waited. Happy with my RSIC, I got airdropped 5 Runestones, thanks to Leonidas. I swept 13 more near the bottom, ending up with 18. I sold early, as I am wont to do. (One of the bad habits I’m working on.)

Anyway. $DOG pumped—hard. It’s still pumping, and I’m still accumulating. I really do think Leo is onto something, and you can hate it all you want, but this much is undeniable:

The People love the $DOG 🐕‍🦺

Prepping for the runes launch

I had wanted a Bitcoin node for a long time. I knew the benefits for the chain: To aid with decentralization by ensuring that another machine stored and kept the on-chain info up to date. But I had a harder time understanding the advantages as an individual user.

Then I saw zk-🦈 and OMB getting into it. That piqued my interest again, and here we are, running an Umbrel. I strongly recommend Umbrel for anyone wanting to run a node, btw. Umbrel makes running a node super-easy and fun, and the user experience is incredible. I have zero affiliation with them. Just legit love the product and the brand (gg Umbrel 🤝)

So as an individual, the advantages for running a node are as follows:

• You can etch runes directly, without requiring a third-party app

• You can bypass third-party apps entirely, thereby avoiding platform fees, platform loading times, and queues

• You can mint runes directly with your node

• You familiarize yourself with the technical aspects of Bitcoin

That last point, imo, is the most crucial factor. If that point appeals to you, I strongly recommend that you pick up a node. If you’re a bit more technical and you’ve got some time on your hands, you might want to pick up a Raspberry Pi and some other tidbits to bootstrap a custom node at home.

Post-runes protocol launch

The sea was angry that day, my friends!

I spent 3 bands minting a few dozen runes. (Damn you, fees!) In hindsight, it would’ve been best to sit on my hands and stay liquid, and wait for things to calm down. Then, the smart move would’ve been to sweep $DOG and chill.

Liquidity is king, after all. And sometimes, the hardest thing to do is wait, and sometimes, waiting can pay off like a mfer.

I think it’s crazy—and we should consider ourselves incredibly fortunate—that today we’re able to experience these historic moments live, not just on our own or with friends, but with the creators themselves. This would be akin to chilling in a Discord with Satoshi, Hal, and the homies when Hal first mined Block 9.

And admission is free. Wild.

So do I still use the node? Well, it’s rare for me to log onto my Umbrel now, but I do keep it running 24/7. It costs me next to nothing to help keep the network decentralized, and as a proponent of Bitcoin and financial freedom, I’m more than happy to contribute to the network, even if in this small way.

There’s also the plus of node running having helped pique my more technical interests. I’ve since picked up this book:

Will I actually learn how to program on Bitcoin? Who knows. The book says Python 3 is a prerequisite 😭, so let’s see.

Which Rune to rule them all? 🪐

I like the idea of provenance. I like RSIC. And I hope RSIC wins.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also believe in $DOG. Not because of some fundamental faith I have in the rune token. I just believe in the power of memes, and the way Leo gets behind this, and all the normies he’s bringing onboard with it, it tells me Leo gets it too, and is willing to put the work in.

The proof is in the pudding, after all, and rn the pudding looks like it’s made out of DOG food 🍮 Are we about to eat?

Happy to find out 🤝

Quantum cats have taken over the god chain. But how? And why? And what are they, even? I’m more of a dog person myself—or so I thought, until these damned cats grew on me over time.

What first caught my eye was their founding team: Taproot Wizards, the og goats of Bitcoin.

But why start a new collection? I had so many questions, like…

I’m sure you do too.

Let’s dive in 🤙

QUANTUM CATS? LIKE SCHRODINGER’S CAT?

Yes, exactly. (Skip this part if you dislike physics, but not rly. Physics is cool!)

So this physicist named Schrodinger thought that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, when applied to everyday objects (like a cat), was absurd. So he devised this experiment to highlight the absurdity.

Let’s picture a box. Inside the box is a cat. The box is closed. There is a killing device in the box, which will kill the cat if activated. It’s activated if the quantum system assumes 1 of 2 of the quantum states. We do not know if the cat is alive or dead until the box is opened. In other words, until the box is open, the cat is both alive and dead: it is in a superposition of both states.

(How absurd!)

But in the quantum realm, a quantum system is in a superposition of states, at least until it’s measured, at which point the wave function and its superposition collapse into a definite state (i.e., when the box is open).

Pretty cool, right?

Anyway, that’s why half the cats in the collection are dead, and the other half are alive. In quantum mechanics, because the cat’s fate is tied to that of the quantum state, it’s said to be entangled. Therefore, if you hold both a live and a dead cat from the collection, you’ll have the purple entangled role in the Discord.

As of now, no one knows what these roles mean, but we keep doing the missions, with the hope that maybe one day, someday soon, op_cat will be enabled, and a chosen few of us may be called upon to ascend the hall of the Taproot Wizards 🧙‍♂️

Anyway. More on the collection.

WHY SO BULLISH ON QUANTUM CATS? 🐂

Quantum Cats are an ordinal project on a mission, a claim most ordinal projects cannot make. The mission is op_cat, which is an operation code for Bitcoin that would enable concatenation, a fancy way of saying that it allows for the combination of byte strings.

Think of lines of code as stacks of plates. The top plate must be cleared for the next plate to rise to the top. But combining the top 2 lines of code, if possible, would grant us various benefits, like improved script efficiency, introducing more smart contract use cases, and a native way to concatenate, rather than having to use workarounds with single lines of code.

That’s op_cat.

The collection, as mentioned in the Intro, is by the Taproot Wizards. I won’t get into them here, but they were early into ordinals, with the og design having originated in a subreddit. (Report on the wizards coming soon.)

THE MISSIONS

The QC community missions are fun. Every couple weeks, the team reveals a mission for the community to embark on. There are no promises of anything; only speculation by holders and others that maybe, just maybe, we might get one step closer to becoming a Taproot Wizard.

But even without the individual incentive, the community missions are appealing, partially because they’re fun, but maybe more significantly, the missions involve a grander sense of purpose and objective, that of improving Bitcoin and cementing Quantum Cats’ place in Bitcoin history.

The missions have led to some of the best community content going viral, like a song explaining op_cat and an animated vid of Avocato playing the BIP Land board game. (Yes, the project has a board game.) The project even has a children’s book out, and it’s badass:

The only other project that is comparable, at least to me, in terms of sense of mission and community impact, is OMB. (That’s Ordinal Maxi Biz for you non-Bitcoin bozos.)

One of OMB’s core missions is to Free Ross. Ross Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, which is where I was orange-pilled. OMB has also seen a successful auction, specifically at the first ordinal auction held by Christie’s.

Back to the cats. No mission is worthwhile without a few obstacles, right?

THE OBSTACLE

Despite what the photo above may tell you, Luke Dash JR. is a serious man. To his credit, he is an OG bitcoiner, although what he’s been up to since then has been questionable.

As a self-proclaimed protector of Bitcoin, he attempted to pass through an innocuously named improvement proposal that would it make it “effective with newer datacarrying styles”.

In actuality, this proposal would have targeted ordinals, and effectively purged them from the chain, disregarding them as spam. In other words, Luke was attempting to gaslight the entire Bitcoin community and pass this through like a sleazy politician, all in the name of defending Bitcoin’s purity 🤺

A LITTLE ABOUT THE TEAM

Investing in people is a solid investment strategy. And the Taproot Wizards team is fucking stacked.

In one corner, we’ve got “Internet Personality” Udi Wertheimer. (Udi also happens to be the cofounder of Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats, a Bitcoin OG, and all-round nice guy.)

Eric Wall is his cofounder. He happens to auction these orbs, which are not part of Eric’s personal art project, although at first glance, you might be left wondering 🔮

The orb’s utility?

For 10 years after it’s auctioned off, you can ask it a question. And for 10 years, Eric will answer. Of course, the interactions aren’t constant; after every question, there’s a cooldown period of 7 days.

The other interesting aspect about this orb is its Harberger tax mechanism:

The keeper (i.e., holder) has to list it for sale, and every year, they are taxed 600%/year to maintain the orb, or it goes up for auction automatically. (The holder gets to keep the revenue, minus royalty.)

Interesting and fun design.

Now let’s look at a couple other members on the team.

Once Rijndael joined the Taproot Wizards as CTO, it was clear he had a pair of brains on him. You can tell by this fascinating article he wrote into the tech behind the cats, in particular how they were able to use recursion to reveal 40 layers of traits, which change over time.

What’s super cool about this is that they introduced the Gold Cape trait at one point, which gets you a Taproot Wizard. So far, only one cat got it at reveal, so I’m curious to see how this will change.

The Gold Cape announcement was made in tandem with the first Gold Cape cat reveal, which was unfortunate for the holder, who had it listed at the time. (It sold instantly, and the buyer auctioned it off and made a nice 💰.)

So who’s the artist behind these wizards and cats? FAR is his name. And he’s a “real” artist, meaning he does other cool shit like this:   

He’s also kinda obsessed with animated bees, like this:

I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch of amazing people on the team, or folks who ought to be mentioned. (Tyler Whittle aka Dr. DAO, dazza9, and himorasi come to mind.)

The Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cats lore is a long one. Oh well. Maybe we’ll dive deeper in the Taproot Wizards report 🧙‍♂️

NOW, ABOUT THOSE DAMNED CATS 🐱‍🐉

Confession time: It’s not my first attempt at writing about Quantum Cats. Many a time I’ve sat at the keyboard and begun my research in earnest, finding myself going down a never-ending rabbit hole of Schnorr signatures, blocksize wars, The BIP process, recursion, etc. etc.

But what I’ve come to realize, this time around, is that the Taproot Wizards team has done a fantastic job of building the lore around the Cats, and embedding them into Bitcoin Culture.

By using the Op_cat mission—among other things (e.g., a Quantum Cat auctioned off at Sothesby’s; image above)—the team has managed to take this set of cat jpegs from nothing to one of the top ordinal collections in the space. (Hats off.)

Where these cats go next is beyond me, but as a fellow holder, I’ll be on the train to finding out. What is certain is that the future value of cats, to an extent, lies in the hands of its holders, as we continue to complete missions and spread the gospel of opcat from the good orange book 📙

My step-by-step farming strategy. Thoughts included. 👨‍🌾

Solana airdrops are right around the corner. And there’s still time for you to join in and potentially secure a bag worth five to six figures. I’ll show you what I’m doing to maximize my chances of getting some massive airdrops, which I plan to swap to SOL and add to my bag. Feel free to adjust the strategy outlined here based on your own conditions, like which assets you hold, how much risk you want to take on, etc.

I’ll outline 2 strategies here: low risk and high risk.

Let’s get it 🤙

Things to note before we begin…

The amount you need to get started. Start with anywhere between 10 and 100 sol or more. Use a burner wallet if you want. Protocols aren’t immune from getting hacked. Up to you.

If you want, you can use multiple wallets. (This is what I’m doing.) I’ve applied pretty much the same strategy for each wallet, with adjustments, depending on which assets I already had in each wallet. (We’re going to be lending and borrowing, so the assets you hold might matter.)

I gave you the wide range of between 10 and 100 sol or more because you might want to spread your SOL out a bit here and there, depending on how much of a degen you are, and how much risk you want to take on. 

Tracking. Keep track of what we’re doing here. Just write down the steps as you execute the strategy, to prevent things from getting messy and confusing. You want to be sure of where all your assets are locked, because you’re going to have to revert the steps later on to retrieve all your assets. 

Feel free to bookmark this article to come back to it later. Near the end, I’ll share a little-known platform that’ll help you keep track of all your Solana assets, and it’s guaranteed to blow your mind 🤯

I’ve also got a YouTube channel now

And I cover this very topic in my most recent video. Watch it to gain additional context. Subscribe if you want more alpha in the future. It’s coming 🤝 

My low-risk strategy

My simple low-risk strategy is like so:

PLATFORM 1: SOLBLAZE

This one’s a no-brainer, and will net you one of the most lucrative airdrops in the coming months. Solblaze is a liquidity staking platform.

SolBlaze

Real quick, what is liquidity staking?

Traditional staking—where we take our assets and stake them on a platform in return for only yield—is vanilla, and it’s not as appealing to us degens. In contrast, liquid staking is a novel approach where we stake our asset (e.g., SOL), and in return, we receive a collateralized version of our asset (e.g., we gib SOL, we get bSOL.)

Doing so allows us to use this freed-up liquidity around the ecosystem, thereby being able to do more with our assets (i.e., make our money work harder for us).

So on Solblaze, stake as much SOL as you want. You’ll get a little less bSOL than SOL, because bSOL is valued slightly higher. Once we get our bSOL, we head over to our next platform.

PLATFORM 2: MarginFi

MarginFi

MarginFi is a lending protocol. Here we’re going to click “Supply” (lend), and provide MarginFi with all of our bSOL. Doing so will provide us with 1 point for every $1 we lend daily.

Next, we can use that bSOL and borrow against it! But why would we want to do a thing like that?

Because MarginFi provides 4x the amount of points for borrowing than it does for lending! In other words…

Lending = 1 point per dollar per day

Borrowing = 4 points per dollar per day

So borrow an asset that’s pegged to SOL (i.e., bSOL, jitoSOL, or mSOL), and if none are available, borrow something with a low APY.

Tip: You might want to cross-check with the next platform to make sure that the asset you’re considering borrowing is also in demand on the next platform. (Just check the Max LTV %.) 😎

PLATFORM 3: Kamino Finance

Kamino Finance

So let’s say you borrowed mSOL from MarginFi because it offers a decent borrow rate, and Kamino Finance wants some mSOL. Now we head to Kamino. Kamino Finance is also a lending protocol, and is a competitor to MarginFi.

You can lend all your mSOL here by clicking on “Supply” and approving in your wallet. Once you’ve supplied, you can borrow jitoSOL. Keep in mind the differences in APY, but we’re farming for airdrops here, so you can expect to lose a little money in the short term. The bet is on the long term (i.e., the airdrops)!

Do keep an eye on the APY % once in a while, tho, because it can change. As long as your net APY % isn’t too negative, you should be good.

Having followed these steps, you should be farming for airdrops on 3 platforms so far: SolBlaze, MarginFi, and Kamino. Now you can take your jitoSOL, go back to MarginFi and lend it all out if you want to be done. Else, you can check out the higher-risk strategy below.

But first, the risks…

Interested in NFT Airdrops?

Tensor is an NFT marketplace on Solana. Tensor volume blows all the other Solana NFT marketplaces out of the water. 

Unfortunately, you stand to reap the most benefits if you hold a Tensorian NFT, from their official NFT collection, but these cost upwards of 85 SOL rn. 

Risk of Impermanent Loss in the Low-Risk Strategy

There’s one main risk you need to be aware of, and that’s impermanent loss. That’s when you supply two tokens, and the price of one of them runs, so people end up buying that token, and you end up with more of the other one. 

The loss isn’t actually realized until you sell the whole bag, so the “loss” part is actually in the opportunity cost of capital (i.e., where would you have made the most money?)

Example: You add funds into a BONK-SOL pool (50% BONK/50% SOL). BONK price runs. Everyone buys it from the pool. You end up with the SOL bag. (When you inject funds into an LP, you’re usually earning a percentage of the transaction fees by supplying that liquidity.)

In this case, you might have netted a lot more had you simply held onto BONK, instead of providing liquidity and earning from the fees. 

The risk here, with the strategy we’re playing, is much lower because we’re playing with coins that are pegged to SOL, so if one coin runs, so does the other one.

That’s not to say that these protocols can’t crash or get hacked, but that’s the risk we’re taking here. Moreover, as mentioned, we’re willing to bleed a little in the short run, because we’re betting on the long play.

The high-risk strategy

Let’s talk about the high-risk strategy and head over to Drift.

Drift is a perpetual and lending protocol, and it just so happens to be one of my favorite platforms out there. Let’s take that jitoSOL you have, and deposit it here. Simply by depositing it, you can use it as collateral on Drift.  

Alternatively, you have the Jupiter protocol.

The first wave of JUP airdrops is closed. There are 3 more waves coming, and here’s what I’m doing to farm for the 2nd wave. I’m using the perp protocol, the swap feature, and the DCA feature, because I’m betting that users of these features stand to gain the most out of the next wave of airdrops.

That’s because the announcement for the first airdrop coincided with the release of these new features. I’m willing to bet that the team will utilize the same approach for the second airdrop, launching it in tandem with a bunch of new features as well, to encourage further farming.

Risk-wise, swaps and DCAing are much less risky compared to perps, so if you want to keep most of your SOL and not degen it away, then you’re going to want to keep it to swaps and DCA.

The perp protocol lets you leverage-trade SOL perps. I love margin trading. It’s basically a way to borrow money against your collateral and multiply your gains—and your losses. The safest bet now is to long SOL when the market is down, obviously, but don’t overleverage and keep your eye on the liquidation price, because you can get your acct wiped out 😭 

I was using Drift for long calls on SOL. Every time the market dipped, I would go long. Unfortunately, I got wiped out, so I’m currently looking at Jupiter for quick scalps. This is because the fees can get confusing, and the longer you play, the more you have to pay to keep your position open.

Drift leverage is also fairly modestly capped, whereas Jupiter lets you degen and go like 100x long. Of course, the liquidation risk is greater, which is why I’ll degen and maybe toss 1 or 2 sol at it before going to bed if I feel like a pump is incoming. 

Compared to Drift, the two major downsides to Jupiter are…

1. Lack of liquidity, which encumbers our ability to enter long positions that we desire, instead having to chase liquidity, which puts us in riskier positions.

2. You can’t place limit orders; only market orders. Basically, you’re forced to buy SOL at the current market price, instead of placing an order so that you can buy it at a specific price (e.g., when SOL hits $105, buy).  

As mentioned, with perps, you can win or lose big, so be careful if you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you want to experiment, learn, and have the spirit of FAFO in you, toss a little sol at it and see what happens.

Final thoughts

The airdrop strategy I shared isn’t fixed; you can switch it up and play around with it as much as you want (e.g., go to Kamino Finance first, and then head to MarginFi after). 

Wen airdrops? The answer depends on the platform. Jupiter is the next big one. Also dubbed Jupuary by many, it’s planned to drop in the last week of January 2024.

In contrast, Solblaze airdrops BLZE tokens every few weeks. Btw, do NOT miss out on the opportunity to take your BLZE tokens and lend them on Kamino Finance for roughly 3% APY (plus points!).

We’ll have to see about the other platforms, but I imagine they won’t be far behind, and should propel SOL higher. Much higher.

Marinade Finance homepage

Why not use Marinade Finance? Marinade’s rewards are coming to an end—but apparently, they’re being renewed! Still, Solblaze will be the better bet long term imo, since their rewards haven’t ended yet, and their BLZE token, the token that’s airdropped every few weeks, should full-send during the bull. (Watch this prediction come back and bite me in the ass 💨)

Lastly, be sure to always have some liquidity on hand—accessible at any and all times—because you might need it to take out all the funds you’ve got tied up in each protocol at a moment’s notice. 

Since we followed steps, it’s a matter of starting with the last step and reverting all our actions when the time comes to pull out. But to do that, we’ll need the minimum amounts required for each protocol, and you may need a little extra here and there for fees and payments and what not. 

Ultimately, the bet is that the airdrops will be worth all the trouble and risk. Of course, as always, none of this is financial advice. I am a bozo, after all 🤡 

Feel free to leave a comment below my YouTube video if you have any questions. Good luck, and happy farming! 👨‍🌾

WAGMI is bullshit. Most jpeg projects will not make it. Most startups, up to 90% of them, end up in failure. When you think about it, startups are new businesses with actual value propositions run by serious people. These people have been able to raise funds based on their value prop.

A jpeg project, on the other hand, has an incredibly low barrier to entry. You can gather a few friends, hatch up some art, cook up a half-baked idea, and run with it. There’s a decent chance you might even succeed with minting out. 💸

When you look at the space, this is what the majority of projects are: Smoke and mirrors.

So if most startups fail, what makes us think that all these jpeg projects will succeed? I’m no math scientist, but the math doesn’t add up. 👨‍🔬 

Reality is, most projects overpromise and underdeliver. I like to look at jpeg projects as startups for retail investors, where the mint funds are akin to seed funding. That’s why it’s rare when a project actually has something to offer before going public.

Hashlings is such a project. Let’s take a closer look.

Tf is a Hashling? 🤨

Money tall like Jordan

Before we begin, I’d like to share that I am the CMO of this project. I share this because I want you to know that I would never join a project team if I didn’t believe in what they’re building. These past few months, I’ve been asked quite a few times to join a project, as Ambassador and what not. Hard pass… until I found Hashlings. 🙂 

So! Let’s get into it. Hashlings is an Ordinals project. One Hashling gets you access to our Bitcoin Clubhouse. Each Hashling also gets you access to a discounted mining rig, which you can purchase separately.

The rig in question is the s19k Pro, the newest rig available. When you get it through Hashlings, the price tag is $1995. Purchase it retail, and it’ll cost you $2520, aaand on top of that…

• You have to pay for shipping and tax.

• You have to run it yourself. Depending on how much electricity costs are around where you live—good luck with that. 😭

• If you receive a damaged rig, you have to cover return shipping if whomever you purchased it from agrees to replace it/refund you. You also have to cover shipping for the new rig + taxes.  

Now, what are the benefits of purchasing the rig via Hashlings?

• Via our strategic mining parter, Luxor, we have a hosting rate of .07 kwh at a partner facility. That’s a fixed-cost agreement, btw, meaning that even in 2025, that the rate we’ll still be paying.

• The $1995 price tag covers all costs, including shipping and tariffs.

• The price tag also includes installation, management, and repairs by the team at Luxor.

• If your rig is damaged or faulty, our team will replace it with one of our own rigs, and we’ll deal with the damaged one on our end. (No skin off your back.)

• Lastly, it’s your rig to own. There is no revshare. (Fuck revshare.) This means, 100% of the sats you’ve mined with your rig end up in your wallet every month. 💰

The only thing you have to cover are the electricity costs every month, which comes out to roughly US$140 per rig. You have the option to pay in fiat, or with the sats you’ve mined… but if you’re smart, you’ll want to keep stacking those sats and figure out a way to pay up with your rapidly depreciating fiat for max profit.

Sound too good to be true? Well…

How is Hashlings able to do this?

Satoshi’s Cave

Hashlings is also registered in the United States, under Satoshi Labs, LLC.

Luxor has only ever partnered with 2 other jpeg projects, btw: OMB and DeGods for the BTC gods mint block.

Hashlings is the third. 😲

Hashlings founder, ASICs, is fully doxxed. His name is Josh Mills, and he ran one of the largest industrial mining facilities in the Midwest before deciding to start his own project.

Before we get into all the other details, yes, there are whale tiers.

If you’re holding 7 Hashlings, you’re a HashLord. Being a Hashlord gives you some privileges and benefits, like…

• 1:1 Honorary custom Hashlord (undisclosed artists) post-Bitcoin halving

• Hashling Welcome Package (swag), sent following completion of mint

• Limited to 125 spots (25 filled already)

If you’re holding 21 Hashlings, you’re a HashKing. Being a Hashking comes with maximum status, privileges, and benefits.

• 1:1 Honorary custom Hashking designed by Zodd post-Bitcoin halving. (Zodd, our artist, is a fucking legend, btw. He’s under NDA for about a dozen projects, but it’s public knowledge that he’s worked on art like Green Eyes for OMB, specifically the bozos in the collection 🤡)

• Private whale chat with the team 🐳

• Hashking Welcome Package (swag), sent following completion of mint

• Future IRL on-site mining opportunities

• Limited to 75 spots (25 filled already)

But being a Hashling isn't just about mining… 

There’s more to being a Hashling than just mining

To wit: Owning a Hashling means you own a pass to our exclusive Bitcoin Clubhouse. In addition to the rig offer, this means…

• You get access to the clubhouse. This might be a given, but if a name’s made it on the Black List, whether they’ve purchased a Hashling or not, they’re banned. We’re aiming to curate a tightknit community of Bitcoin goats and legends. If you’ve made it, Welcome.

• You get access to exceptional courses relating to Bitcoin. We create these courses ourselves, and you can even request or propose course ideas. If it makes sense, and there’s enough demand, we might create one. If not, we can always bring in an expert to hold a webinar.

• You get to attend private AMAs with prominent members in the Bitcoin community. We’re planning to bring in a roster of only the best of whom Bitcoin has to offer. Do members want us to bring in someone to chat about special sats? You got it. Want someone to come in and talk about Luxor? Done.

• You get access to whitelist spots to highly coveted projects + other benefits with collaborating communities. Any project can ask another project to get whitelist spots. That’s cool. But we aim to secure and curate only the best projects out there. Our members are NOT exit liquidity, so we want to vet every project carefully before sharing with our community.

Sound pretty good? 🤝

A long-term plan in the making

Hashlings: An Invitation-Only Bitcoin Club

When we’re ready to offload the rigs come late 2025, we’ll sell them off to retail together. However, should you want your rig(s), just cover shipping and we’ll send it wherever you want.

Now is the cheapest time to buy in and get a Hashing with these heavily discounted rigs. In other words, as far as asymmetric bets go, if you’re a believer in Bitcoin, now might be the most opportune time for you to get in before the bull run is in full send. 🚀

Remember: If you’re not early, you’re late. If you’re late, you’re chasing your own tail, and that usually ends badly.

The private sale is on now, and is by Invitation Only. The price is $299 USDC per Hashling, so put on your best tux and hit me up in the dm’s on Twitter if you’ve got any questions or you’re thinking of joining up.

You don’t have to be someone special; you just have to bring the right vibes. We’ll airdrop the Hashlings once we hit our internal targets. Progress is looking good. Vibes in the Clubhouse are fantastic.

There really is no better way to become a $BTC miner rn. 🧡

My bozo chef: “What’s cookin’?”

Free mints were all the hype a minute ago. Bozo Collective. Goofs. Penguins. And a gang of other shite derivatives. Let’s get into it.

Bozos in the front

Bozo Collective kicked off the free mint meta, and we’re not just talking about the meta. We’re talking art, Discord strategy, Twitter game strategy, etc. Everyone thought it would be a rug, but how do you rug a free project?

Well, today we know better. It’s been a couple weeks, and Bozos look like they’re here to stay. But we did learn from Goofs how you actually can rug a free project.

Grifters done goofed 💀

What quickly followed Bozo Collective were a string of shitty derivatives.

My Peng Collective

Peng Collective, a bunch of cute-looking penguins, followed suit. Art was similar, but I dug it ngl. What was interesting is that they relied on art only and still managed to sell out, without having to push hard for collabs and marketing. Needless to say, post-mint, they went a bit quiet, and the project is effectively dead.

Discord deleted. Apparently some $PENG token is getting airdropped to holders, but who knows what they’ll be worth? 🤔 

Bozo Girls, an obvious copycat of Bozo Collective, sprung up and died as fast as it came. I never looked at ‘em closely, and I’m glad I faded.

Goofs… This one stings a bit. Let’s get into it.

I ran a giveaway with them. The project founder, Director Goofs, told me I’d get 20 wl spots. He also told me they would run 20 giveaways on a space I’d be hosting for the project with the founder, Director Goofs.

We started the space at 9 pm my time. Twitter rugged us 4 times. Some more technical difficulties ensued, where we couldn’t see the founder in the audience, so we couldn’t listen to him. I had to hop on a Discord call with him during the live space, and boost my volume to have him talk while I held up my phone.

We ran the space for 1h25min. It was fun af. We did a feet pix giveaway based on feet pix in the comments. We had people come up and tell their funniest sex stories. (Some were more weird than funny.) There was some white list begging…

Here’s the link if you want to run it back:

twitter.com/i/spaces/1yoKM…

— Valerioshi X+ (@valerioshi_)
Oct 5, 2023

The next day, I took some time to collate a list of all the OG role winners + wl spot winners. I sent that stuff over at least 2 days before mint (48h+), via Twitter DMs. Strangely enough, he was incredibly communicative before the space. After the space, I had to ping him multiple times on Twitter, and then follow up on Discord:

Look. I get it. Project founders are busy. But we held a community space and hosted a giveaway. Now I’m getting hounded by your community members, who are upset and angry ‘cause you failed to deliver.

Wild.

Then someone DM’d me this from another Discord:

Bruh 💀

Goofs launched on Taiyo Robotics’ launchpad. Taiyo’s founder Solport Tom and I had a chat about it, and he shared the wallet addys that were sent over. Surprise, surprise. The wallet addys were missing. 😒

Now they're blaming the Atlas3 platform, saying something went wrong there with wl allocation. They also held auctions, making roughly US$10k to $15k off this grift. (So, not free?)

Then their collection got hacked, and all the NFTs were displaying like what’s shown below:

Come on, bruh. At this point, I gotta ask:

Are you grifting, retarded, or both?

My final thoughts

At the end of the day, I’m sorry for the folks who trusted me with Goofs. A founder DM’d me yesterday and said that Director Goofs is a rugger who’s been involved in several rugs on Ethereum.

Shame. If this sounds negative to you, too bad. I’m not going to sugarcoat shit or not talk about something because it’s negative. I think there’s a line between being real, being positive, and being toxic. I want to be real without being toxic, but I reject toxic positivity as well. If these frauds don’t get called out, what are we doing?

I don’t watch Big Brother, but this GIF is on point

There are a bunch of derivatives I haven’t mentioned here. No need to give them attention. Whoever you are, I hope you make money off of free mints. Just think twice before you choose to buy a free mint on secondary.

Btw, Bozo Collective and I are still in DMs. They don’t have much to gain by continuing to engage with me… unless they do see a future path for their project. Either way, the Bozo founder has been cordial, responsive, and timely in his DMs. Respect for that.

Bozos lead the way 👑

Next time, on Degen Reports:

I think I’ll talk about Hashlings. Just joined the team as their CMO. It’s got a lot of strengths, and I like the project a lot (or I wouldn’t have joined it, obviously!). Anyway. See you next time, and thanks for reading! 🧡 

NFT lending protocols are becoming popular staples of every major chain today. They first exploded on Solana, w/ Sharky.fi. Similar lending mechanics were introduced to Blur afterward, w/ Blur Blend. Then came Liquidium, the first DeFi protocol on Bitcoin, which also happens to be an ordinal lending platform, and it’s about to bust out of beta in a major way.

Let’s take a look at how NFT lending works, and I’ll share my personal experiences, what I’ve learned while averaging 160% APY on Sharky.fi, and any thoughts that might help you if you want to run lending.

But first… why lend? Why not borrow?

Credit makes the world go brrr.

Always been that way. From the polished Venetian bankers to the lavish Buddhist temples in China that would put up their temple gold as collateral for loans, this is how creditors around the world accumulated capital, and thus power, throughout history. (An exceptional read on this subject is David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5000 Years”.)

Lenders lend and usually win. Borrowers borrow and take on a lot more risk, and sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Another way to look at lending vs. borrowing is to see it in a similar dynamic to shorters vs. long traders: They’re opposite sides of the same coin, engaged in a pvp battle.

Still, in lending vs. borrowing, the game isn’t necessarily zero sum, and that’s the fundamental difference. In a lender’s market, both parties can come out on top, and that’s the appeal for the borrower: The opportunity cost of capital.

Let’s look at an example:

An NFT project is about to drop. Bob is convinced it’ll pump, and he’s got 5 whitelist spots. He posts an NFT he wants to put up as collateral. Alice sees the post, and accepts the loan terms. (i.e., Bob secures the loan against his NFT, which he would lose to Alice if he fails to pay up within the agreed-upon deadline.)

Bob borrows the sum he needs, he mints, and if his hypothesis is correct, he flips for a healthy profit, pays Alice back the loan (w/ interest), and pockets the profit.

Win-win 🤝

But you see what the problem is here, specifically for the borrower? Their gamble has to be right, so they are technically taking on the bigger risk. (Technically, Bob also gets the bigger reward, but Alice can just sit back and lend funds to many Bobs at a time, thereby being able to accrue some serious capital w/o having to incur additional risk.)

Alice gains something either way, even if Bob fails to pa

y back. The only real issue crops up in times of significant and sudden market downturns, which I’ll cover later on.

But rn, let’s take a look at Sharky lending real quick.

NFT Lending on Solana: Sharky.fi

For this piece, I wanted to focus on Sharky for several reasons:

1. It’s the best lending protocol out there so far. (I’ve used Blend. Not impressed.)

2. Liquidium isn’t open to the public, and it’s early days. (I’m also an angel investor in Liquidium, w/ beta access, but it’s not there yet. Liquidium will get there, and it’s building rn during the bear. Remember: Sharky has roughly 1 year on both of these apps.)

   Long term, Liquidium on Bitcoin will be amazing, but again, on Bitcoin. If you want to lend only on Bitcoin, that’s fine too, but I like to diversify and make sure my bags are active as much as possible to accumulate more capital.

3. Sharky has the best loan conditions out of any app out there. It’s also the easiest tool to use, easy to understand, easy UX, everything easy 🤙

Unfortunately, Sharky is on Solana only, and that’s fine. I am long-term bullish on $SOL b/c Solana has a few compelling use cases, like if it pivots to a casino/gambling chain w/ gaming, then it could become one of the best chains in the world, w/ opportunities to onboard the masses. (Normies may have an irrational hatred toward blockchains, but they sure do love gambling.)

“Sounds perfect! Where do I sign up?”

Not so fast.

NFTs on Solana: The collateral problem

Top 5 Solana projects based on 30-day window

This issue isn’t unique to Solana anymore. It’s no secret that we’re in an NFT bear market. In fact, this is the worst one I’ve experienced thus far.

Point is, it’s harder to determine what is “safe” to take as collateral rn. However, when there’s blood, that’s typically the best time to buy, and it also happens to be the best time to loan. (Scared money don’t make money.)

So if you’re still good w/ your conviction bets, look for projects you believe in on Solana. (rn, I’m liking Sharky, Solcasino, and Vtopia.)

In other words, you have to be good w/ 2 factors:

1. You’re bullish on $SOL.

2. You’re bullish on specific NFT projects on Solana that you can accept as collateral.

Still here? Good. Now let’s talk about the main risk.

Lending: The worst risk factor is… ⚫🦢

Market downturns suck, but they can suck especially for lenders. That’s b/c you might have a considerable number of defaults on your hands, so you end up w/ lower liquidity and a bunch of NFTs.

This happened to me during the FTX crash. I ended up “losing roughly 400+ $SOL”, w/ 4 t00bs defaulted, at 80 sol each.

Yeah. You read that right. Just a few weeks later, they were trading at upwards of 200 sol. Had I chosen to sell the t00bs, I would’ve nearly doubled my capital sum. This is why investing in blue chips/conviction bets is imperative, or you risk getting wiped out.

At this point, you can either choose to hold onto your collateral, since, w/ a price crash, what you’re getting are these NFTs at a discount. Since you believe in their long-term value as a holder, you should be comfortable holding until prices pump back up, and further.

This factor also depends on your time horizon: Do you want a quick flip for more liquidity? Or would you like to diversify and hold? As you can see, the lender’s got options, and optionality always wins 🤝

Thoughts on lending via Liquidium and Blend

It’s funny. I’ve only ever acted as a lender on Solana. But on Ethereum? I’ve never been a lender. I’ve used Blend a couple times, once w/ my Beanz and another w/ my Pengu, and I defaulted on purpose both times.

Why is lending on Ethereum not appealing? Is it b/c of all the exorbitant gas fees that make me want to spoon my eyes out? Probably. How much am I really making if I have to pay, say, $30 in gas fees and the interest is very little?

Another issue is that Blend offers perpetual lending w/ 0% interest. Unlike Sharky, it does not offer fixed terms. This means that the risks—as well as the rewards—are not as clear, hence introducing conditions of uncertainty I’m not comfortable operating under.

While writing this part, I toyed w/ the idea of testing lending on Ethereum, but I’ll pass for now. Gas fees are way high 😂

From broke to lender extraordinaire

If I’ve done my job correctly, you should be convinced that being a lender is an awesome way to snowball your bags and accumulate more capital. Lending is my main DeFi play, and I’m hoping that an amazing lending platform comes to Ethereum eventually. For now, I’m sticking to Solana (Sharky) and Bitcoin (Liquidium) lending.

So… you in?

Here are my thoughts.

The Context: How it all went down in the bg

Sharing the bg here. You can skip this part if you don’t want the contextual drama behind what led to the dump in floor price.

1. A whale had a personal issue (a family medical emergency), and she dumped 200 gods and a bunch of $dust. We’re friends, and I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, although admittedly the timing is funny.

2. We had the Bangkok dinner, hosted by Jet, a Director of X+. The dinner lasted 5 ½ hours, and it was fantastic. Kevin and I were sat next to each other and we spoke at length, about how the team works, their history, corporate structure and operations, etc. (Bullish af 🤝).

Kevin: "There’s gonna be a psyop” (jk)

1. The Director exited a couple days later, again, partially due to irl stuff. (He called me, and we talked.) I’m sharing it here b/c it’s public already; he and his wife have both tweeted about it.

   I won't share the tweets here, but he apparently lost half a milly in revenue as CEO of his irl biz, and his wife tweeted that his son needs his father. (You get the message.)

2. Part of it was due to toxicity. Some gods were attacking him for various reasons, people calling him a snake in chats, etc. Afterward, his wife asked him, “Why did we host a dinner for a community that treats us like this?” Fair.

Why am I mentioning this? ‘Cause sell shaming is loser shit. Yeah, I get it. If you want to sell, sell via OTC, especially if you’re a major whale. Think of your community too. As a whale, you have a responsibility to your community. (I agree w/ this to an extent.)

Also: Don’t gloat about selling the project on Twitter, b/c obviously there will be some community backlash. But going off at members who have actually contributed makes me wonder what you’ve done for the community.

To those who have left, especially those of you who’ve made valuable contributions, I salute you. 🐐

And now, w/ that out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff.

Art Refresh: The Downgrade

OG “Psyop” art

The original rollout of the art refresh was underwhelming af. People spotted mistakes. The messaging was, “Flat. Muted.” What fell flat was the messaging; it was muted.

There was also talk of a psyop: Was all this—the art, the poor rollout, etc.—was all of it planned to lower expectations? I bought into the idea. In fact, although the team still denies it, I’m hesitant to take this tin foil hat off.

Why?

There was this tweet from Frank:

Then there was the Johnny video. Johnny never does videos. All of a sudden, he’s on a video explaining the art. Btw, it looks like someone’s forcing him to read off a script b/c he looks like he’s struggling to hold back the laughter. Either he’s a bad actor, or he’s incredibly camera-shy. ❤

Anyway, the example he shows in the video is of a DeGod w/ one arm, and he says they’re not changing anything. That’s one reason why everyone thought it was a psyop, except… the new art reveal still has the missing arm dude! So… no psyop? 🤔

About the art itself. I love most of the art. A few pieces are rugs, like the cleanest ones. I had one that I thought would look amazing, but ended up looking like a human peen. See below:

From clean to peen

However, some of the messier, rugged combos got banger makeovers. I feel like I won the lottery w/ this one, my current pfp:

What I love most about the Art Refresh is this: It’s a combination of extremely muted vs. incredibly loud tones. The contrast works, and that’s why the colors really pop.

Also: As you can see from the ex. above, the art isn’t necessarily simplified; it’s cleaner. The bg is equally complex, but still, cleaner. Same w/ the robe and the beard. See, even here, it’s the strong contrast between simplified x complex that still produces a cleaner god, and these complementary dichotomies, when they work, come to work together like a mfer.

DeGrade: 9/10 🔥, but only until they fix the peens, and a couple other issues w/ the art. Then it’s 10/10, easy. Still, probably the best art in the jpeg game. I know. Art is subjective, but DeGods art fucks. iykyk

Points Parlor v.1: Underwhelming?

Points Parlor is a “game” where you win prizes by opening packs. You purchase the packs using your points, earned from staking your gods.

Only 15 min after the launch, the complaints started flooding in. It was almost as if holders were upset that a perfect product wasn’t up for grabs on Day 1. Yeah, the team fucked up big time by overhyping expectations. Frank even said we were going to break the internet, then tweeted that the internet broke us 💀

But I believe some of the complaints are unfair, mainly aimed at the prizes: Yes, there’s soap and there’s a pair of crocs in there too. (Worst prizes ever ngl) But there are also amazing prizes. There’s a Tesla, a 65” Samsung Frame TV, there are iPhones, MacBooks, etc. You always win something, and for most of the prizes, you win $dust.

To activate the game, and thus, gain access to your Art Refresh + Points Parlor, you need to fork out 333 $dust. Since most of the winnings are in $dust anyway, I really just see this as a form of security deposit/advanced payment, where you take your $dust and lock it in, and it unlocks slowly every day, based on your winnings. (Currently, $dust is floating a little under $1.)

If you get lucky, you get something like this guy:

@frankdegods@DeGodsNFT@kevindegods Look what points parlor gave me today ❓❓❓❓#SIII#pointsparlor DeGods just paid for my Uber rides Thank you @KrakenNFT

— $wingman.SWOOSH (@NFTClassof2021)
Aug 18, 2023

Someone won the Samsung TV ytd. I saw a couple others win the DeGods-branded Ledger, as well as an Apple TV. (Congrats. Happy for you. Nice. 😒)

The Design. Folks have been raving about the design, but I’ll be the odd one out here: It’s weak in terms of brand direction, and I’d also love a bit more agency w/ the UX.

Let me elaborate.

For brand direction, the feel of Points Parlor has nothing to do w/ DeGods. I was expecting some old school social media vibes, combined w/ the pleasing sounds of opening those crispy card packs, be they FIFA or the NBA, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh… you get the idea. Also: Despite being a fan of AI, I’m not loving the AI-style design. (And is it purple b/c of Kraken’s branding?)

Crispy card packs: Muted, but you can still hear them being torn open

For the UX, I was expecting a bit more involvement. I open 40+ to 60+ packs per day, and sitting here passively while the repetitive animations run through the motions gets redundant and boring quick. Get me in there, chief, and lemme click on each pack.

My girl had a different idea: Turn it into a wheel of some sort, so you can see all the different prizes, and how close you came to winning them. Slot machine vibes. 🎰

The Strategy. There are 3 types of packs, all of which have the same base prize, but contain different prizes. So my strategy is currently 2×2×2, but on some days I’ll run 3×3×3. This is b/c of the Halvening, where the base price of each pack doubles every 30 days. (Here’s the manual if you want to take a look.)

Quick Verdict. Tbf to the team, it’s early days. I think we’re on Week 2 now. The prizes will improve. (More prizes coming this week, Kevin says.) Points Parlor has only one major sponsor rn—Kraken—which is providing most of the prizes. The only other sponsor is Ledger, which is offering a DeGods-branded Ledger. That’s it.

Early days.

Frank announced a few days ago on Leap’s space that the team would be adding the remaining 30-odd BTC gods to the Parlor, yanno, the ones that were meant to be raffled off a few months ago 🐂

Looking forward to v1.1 🤑 

Vibes in X+ rn

At X+, we’re staying super positive. Yes, we’ve lost a few members, a couple of them good friends, but many of them were traders, some of whom were overleveraged. In other words, they weren’t collectors or holders w/ long-term conviction in the project. The way I see it, their faith wavered as soon as the team botched the Season 3 rollout.

Oops. 🤷‍♂️

In the meantime, X+ voted on an Approval Committee, which passed via majority vote. This move was done to ensure that we continue to build the most elite community in jpegs, by vetting individual members prior to entry.

Onward.

DeGods Season 3.33

A lot’s happened in the past week. DeGods price crashed. Machi came in w/ roughly 400 gods and dumped them. (Last I checked, he was still holding 28, but they are grails.)

Then came the whales to the rescue. Kicked off by none other than zk-🦈, founder of OMB and former DeGods Alpha team member, the god whales rallied on Twitter, declaring that they would purchase DeGods OTC from Machi direct. FLC, Pokee, and a couple others raised their hands. The deal never materialized, but it did help turn the sentiment for a positive one.

One thing I wish Frank had done different: Instead of trying to placate to Machi, it would’ve been smarter if he had rounded up the whales in X+ first and had a group chat.

Another issue pointed out by another DeGod, and one I noticed affects jpeg collections at large, is when a single whale holds a huge percentage of the collection. It would be best if communities could figure out how to grow their mid-tier whale holdings. For DeGods, this figure would range between 10 and 30.

The biggest gap rn. The most obvious gap at present is the $dust sink. If holders keep winning $dust as the base prize, other than the gas fees preventing us from dumping it all at once on the market, what’s stopping the dump?

Nada! (Maybe speculative future utility, but that’s it.)

So the sell pressure is strong, which is why the most critical task at hand for the team rn is to figure out how to make all that $dust sell pressure disappear. A few folks have told me that $dust DAO is the most obvious solution to this challenge, although I fail to recognize the incentive for a DAO to accumulate $dust.

(Would the whole point be just to accumulate $dust as a sink? I get that it would enable CEX listings due to legal reasons, but I’m dumb. Would love for someone to explain this to me 😂)

Happy to revisit this part once I understand it better.

Anyway. Early days. And like the team says, no easy days. Iterations. Feedback. Reiterations. Cycles of improvement. All that noise.

Yeah, the whole jpeg market’s down. Madmen are shouting from the corners of marketplaces that NFTs are dead. But should they make a comeback, this is the team to do it. Some say, the comeback will be a movie.

Let’s see 🤝 

The jpeg markets are quieter than they’ve ever been. Crypto Twitter is dead and boring rn. On the weekly ordinals segment on “The Down Bad Show”, when they asked for any bullish news, I had none. (I wish I had something positive to say, but I can’t just make shit up 😂)

We’re down bad. Really bad 📉 

Top NFT Collection metrics based on the last 30 days

Floor prices are trending downward across the board. Projects minting out have become a rarity, not the standard. So what’ll it take for a project to launch successfully and beat the odds against these negative market conditions?

A quick caveat before we begin: The points I discuss when considering an NFT project are far from an exhaustive list. They’re simply points I find interesting, and I have thoughts around them that I’d like to share.

Let’s go 🤙 

What’s an NFT project anyway?

Is an NFT project… a company? Is it an art project? What is it, even? I’m not going to rehash all this here. We’re all familiar w/ the arguments. Let’s just define an NFT project as an amalgam of a multitude of borrowed factors. To me, it resembles a startup—w/ jpegs, where the jpegs are a representation of a shareholder’s holding/s.

In the long run, say 2 to 3 years, 90% of all startups fail. (I was surprised that this figure is only 90%, since 95% or more of businesses fail within the same time period. Maybe this is b/c ppl who launch startups aren’t total noobs, like many new business owners are.)

… which brings me to my next point: Starting an NFT project is easier than launching a business irl. With NFTs, you don’t have to deal w/ any bureaucratic red tape. Just grab an idea, link up w/ the right people, and you can launch your very own NFT project in as little as a few days.

So, w/ an even lower barrier to entry, the failure rate of NFT projects should be somewhere upwards of 95%. But again, this depends on how you define “success”, and in turn, “failure”.

Cets: A project that once had great potential

Let’s say that projects that haven’t been doing shit for a while can be called failures, like Cets. (Not sorry.) Let’s give some of the projects that fall into this category a little leeway, tho. For example, Seals have been fairly quiet, but it wouldn’t be fair to label them a failure.

And yes, even so-called art projects, should they fail to continue to deliver to their holders, I consider failures too; that is, unless they correctly aligned expectations early on (i.e., pre-mint), by stating that the project would conclude once X objective was achieved.

Anyway. Enough ranting; w/ that context in mind, here’s what I consider when buying into an NFT project.

The bull signals of NFT projects

I used to look mainly at founders and teams as an investment signal. Specifically, 3 factors relating to founders:

Are they cult leaders?

Frank DeGods, pre-doxx

Think of strong NFT project leaders. Frank, Wab, and Zk, to name a few. First, note the correlation between their presence/absence and the floor price. (One way to measure impact.) Now let’s look at how they influence community presence.

A leader must have the ability to lead their community. This sounds obvious at first, but when you don’t have a roadmap, you’re going in blind. If a leader has a vision, but they can only share it piecemeal, then they must command the respect of their holders, maintain hope, and be able to sustain their attention for the long haul.

It’s obviously unrealistic to expect project leaders to deliver constantly. There’s uptime, but most time in the space is actually downtime.

So what do we do during downtimes?

When we get bored, or we feel like nothing’s happening, we sell. So the trick is to make people feel like things are always happening in the bg. That’s where Discord comes in.

We can think of Discord as a waiting room of sorts. Games and events happen. Chats are busy. But other than the chats, Discord activities mostly comprise events that are indirectly or semi-directly connected to the project (e.g., other project wl spots, poker and/or other games, Discord AMAs, etc.).

Through all this, cult leaders will have created such a strong following around them that the faith they’ve fostered will help them see it through, regardless of whether a project has an official roadmap. (Many don’t.) So if a project that’s been around for a while doesn’t have a roadmap but has a strong following, that’s bullish af for me 🐂 

Can the founder Twitter/X?

Wab.eth, founder of Sappy Seals

Are they able to control the narrative? Do they have a sound understanding of guerrilla marketing principles? Do they get engagement like a mfer?

Most founders suck at Twitter. That’s why they’re always dm’ing and trying to partner w/ different brands, KOLs, and influencers to try to expand their reach, especially pre-mint. (Imagine if a company’s stock price pumped or dumped based on how active their founder is on Twitter.)

Anyway. Say a project mints out. That’s great! So what’s next?

Many founders are invisible on Twitter post-mint. (Hell, most of them are invisible pre-mint 😁.) But neglecting Twitter is like turning your back on the greatest sales pit in the world. Everywhere else, be it YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever… that’s the tourist tour. If you’re a degen who’s deep into crypto and jpegs, you’re on Twitter. That’s where the real ones are.

And if a founder’s not talking about their project to the real ones, who tf are they talking to?

Is the founder a critical thinker?

Do they KISS? Do they know how to coordinate effectively?

I’m going to share some constructive criticism w/ one of my favorite founders here: Solport Tom of Taiyo Robotics fame (OG solana project that got derugged).

I was a holder of gen1 and gen2 Taiyo + Pilots (gen3). Tom also owns Solsteads Surreal Estate and Citizens by Solsteads. Yeah, you counted right. That’s 5 projects. Most project owners struggle w/ a single project. How does he have the bandwidth for 5?!

Tom also took the Pilots reveal process and supposedly gamified it into a multistep process. I’m sorry, but if I receive a gift, I don’t want a multistep process to find out what it is. I just want to unwrap, unbox, and enjoy.

That’s it.

Pilots Marketplace

If you want to gamify anything, it’s not the mint experience that needs to be gamified. It’s the experience itself. When I buy into an NFT project, I’m buying into a specific experience promised by that project. And the experience doesn’t stop at mint; it begins there, so there’s absolutely no need to micro-gamify that experience.

Btw, Tom is a legit founder, and he works really hard to serve his holders. These are just some of the signals that forced me to sell. That’s all.

Anyway. These are the main factors I used to consider. (Sometimes, less is more.) But sometimes, more is more, so I’ve since expanded a bit of my thinking here, and I’d like to share several other factors I’ve identified that I believe can act as clear bull signals:

Community

Community is a big one for me. It’s pretty much the only signal I paid attention to when I decided to pick up an OK Bear recently 👌 First, I noticed that their Twitter game had changed considerably, in that holders were rallying heavy at the project’s slightest mention. All right… hinting at a gamified Twitter approach here. Interesting.

I had Warbucks, marketing at OK Bears, on a space, and we talked about community. I felt he truly believed in the power of community. I checked the Discord. Whoa. It was built different, fine-tuned like a German orchestral machine.

Three promising factors I noticed right off the bat in the Discord:

1. I got a warm welcome from a ton of OK Bears. (Not as many on Twitter tho.)

2. They were running raffles for holders, but w/ irl items. Prizes included iPhone 14’s (newly launched at the time) and Rolexes, delivering tangible value to holders.

3. They negotiated a discount deal w/ a hotel in Amsterdam for holders. (Awesome.) There’s no shame in securing discounts, even if you’re an elite club. Just think about pleasing holders. Your project successfully negotiated a deal w/ an irl business. That’s a win in any book, not just mine 🤝

A sustainable model

How will the project sustain itself? The answer is specific to every project. There are so many ways to skin a cat. But there are many wrong ways to go about it too. For instance, dilution has recently been found not to be the way.

So what is the way?

It depends, mainly on which chain the project lives on. That’s b/c the chain—its philosophy, and in turn, its specific incentivization scheme’s design as well as its consequent use case—will largely determine how a project can function.

Take Bitcoin. Its design appeals mainly to digital art collectors, numismatists, and so on. That’s b/c, thanks to ordinal theory, we’re able to enumerate individual sats and inscribe immutable digital art directly upon them.

Now take Solana. It appeals to traders and flippers b/c it’s ridiculously fast, and its tx’s are cheap af. DeFi is also making a comeback on Solana, so DeFi-related DAOs w/ jpegs, gaming projects, and casino projects (e.g., Solcasino) should fare well in the next bull.

Now let’s take Ethereum. The first smart-contract chain’s appeal has changed recently, and not for the better. Its positioning and reputation have been tarnished, partially due to the Bitcoin Ordinal boom, but also thanks to Blur’s design driving prices to the bottom. A confusing appeal? As they say in sales, “A confused mind says, ‘No.’”

That’s not to say that a project launching has to fit squarely into one of these categories. It’s just easier to identify those w/ more revenue generation potential if the project’s mission and philosophy are aligned w/ those of its chosen chain. (Ex. An art project would fare better launching on Bitcoin today than it would on any other chain.)

Continued value delivery to holders 

Numbers go up? Amazing. But if that’s all we wanted, we would’ve bought coins, not jpegs, right? So what are we buying when we actually buy an NFT?

It’s a hodgepodge of different elements: Other than financial gains, community (a grossly underrated and under-leveraged “utility” of NFTs), friendship, knowledge, etc.

Other than the fun activities organized by projects, like raffles and games, it’s incumbent upon project teams rn to figure out how to go from a value extraction model to a value delivery model. There are so many different ways to do it; each project should pursue revenue generation models that work for them. Those that can’t—or won’t—will get left behind.

Let’s see which projects are left standing once the dust settles, and whether their models will act as foundations for projects that follow.

Realigning expectations

I’m not a believer in wagmi. Sorry. The game just isn’t designed that way. As Taleb points out, like the professions of actors, novelists, etc., the NFT project market is mostly a zero-sum game, where the winner-take-all effect is in play.

I’m not trying to be a party pooper. I’m for positivity too, but not at the expense of truth. (We must always operate from a position of reality, even when our reality is unpleasant.) Truth is, most NFT projects will not make it. I don’t know which ones will, but I do have a thesis, thoughts on which I’ve shared above.

Feel free to act accordingly 🎣

gm ordinal collectooors.

Let’s take a look at some tools. 🤝🧰

Liquidium: An ordinal-lending protocol

Liquidium is the most exciting thing to happen to Bitcoin since… ordinals. It’s the first DeFi protocol to launch on Bitcoin, ever. And it did it w/ no dumb contracts. (I jest. There are uses for smart contracts, but we don’t need them here on Bitcoin; literally built different 💪)

On Liquidium, you can lend or borrow $BTC and use your ordinal/s as collateral. You want to watch out for a few things here, tho, as shown in the example below.

Example:

The loan amount here is 0.07 BTC, but the fp is 0.03 BTC. The dapp should not permit borrowers to set loan amounts greater than the fp. (What’s stopping the borrower from running w/ the funds?) Obviously, it’s up to the lender to do their due discretion as well, but imposing these conditions would go a long way to boost lender confidence and lower risk.

Keep in mind, the platform is still in closed beta, so hopefully they address/resolve some of this stuff prior to opening to the public. Regardless, Liquidium is an impressive achievement, and I look forward to using the lending feature religiously once they crack it. (Lenders ftw 🤝)

Xverse, Unisat, and Sparrow: Wallets

(Full disclosure: I’m considering joining Xverse as an angel investor.)

My favorite Bitcoin wallet is Xverse, obviously. That’s b/c Jan from Xverse is a friend of mine. And if you’re active in the space, you know that Jan is a recognized 🐐 in the Bitcoin community. Here’s an example.

Xverse has been relying on Hiro’s indexer, which has caused some recent issues (like people’s ordinals not showing up in their wallet). This was resolved yesterday.

Until then, Jan had been going on a tear on spaces explaining the situation. But more than that, I was keen to discover that Xverse is working on some major shit in the bg. How do I know? Trust me, bro. 

Unisat is an amazing wallet too. They run their own indexer, and they’ve got their own marketplace, which is arguably the most popular BRC-20 marketplace... for now. (Also look at ME’s BRC-20 marketplace.) Unisat has also got a points system, which you can farm for whatever may come later. (Are you feeling degen enough? 🤨)

Sparrow is a fantastic wallet if you’re a math scientist who’s into advanced theoretical physics and shit. Jokes aside, if you do know how to navigate it, it can be an incredibly powerful tool. You can extract specific sats via sat ranges, and even send bulk txs. The UI leaves a lot to be desired, tho. (See below.)

Ord.io: Ordinal scanner

Want some alpha? 👀 Spend 10 min/d browsing Ord. Just 10 minutes is all it takes to check the inscriptions you want for the day.

This is b/c you can check inscriptions on the Bitcoin chain as each block goes live. In other words, you don’t have to dig around the bird app sleuthing for the next potential win. The wins are right there, all in plain view for anyone who cares to look.

Oh, you want more alpha? Some of the inscriptions display their project names in blue under the inscription number. Others don’t, like the ones in the image above. But based on the variations, you can guess the majority are from a single project. Click through and check out the wallet/s. See what other stuff they might be holding. Check those too.

Keep digging. Also check out other top projects, and look for holders who hold many pieces. Then see what else they’ve got in their wallet, and dyor on those projects too. Ord offers solid ground and strong scent trails.

Happy hunting.

Ordinal Hub

Ordinal Hub’s got a suite of tools for ordinals. It’s got…

• A price tracker. Shown above, the price tracker shows the most popular projects and their price changes over preset time ranges.

• Trending. Also shown above, the UI is pleasing, tho you can tell that the functionality is still being built out.

• Sat scanner. Input your wallet, and the scanner tells you if you’ve got special sats. Pretty basic rn, but it looks like the team will add extraction soon.

• API for devs. Ordinal Hub offers an indexer for devs at tiered price points. There is a free option if you can settle for 5 requests a minute + other restrictions. The paid plan starts at $999/mo. Yeahhh… not cheap, but then again, they have their own indexer (!).

  Impressive.

Sating.io

Sating has been keeping busy (and quiet). Sating started off as a rare sats extractor. Today, it offers an expanding suite of tools, including “Safe Send” (send sats w/o risking any special sats) and “Inscribe” (inscribe on any sat you want).

More powerful tools are coming, like “Bulk Inscribe”. Sating’s also opened up a marketplace for special sats. (See below.) Prices are generally higher than if you negotiate w/ individual sat hunters, but you pay a premium for convenience, right?

APP

APP is the brainchild of Chartfu, ME’s CDO and founder of Bitcoin Bandits. It was created w/ the sole purpose of “teleburning” an NFT from other chains and onto Bitcoin, and inscribing it as an Ordinal.

The app came to fruition from a guerrilla marketing campaign launched by the founder of OMB, Zk-🦈, who encouraged other projects to burn a cryptopunk in exchange for wl spots. (At the time, the # of spots to be handed out was unknown.)

Bitcoin Bandits were the first to do it. DeGods were next in line. The campaign was a massive success, and both projects won 33 wl spots each at 0.09 BTC. The “burned” punks and OMBs were fractionalized and airdropped to Bandit holders. (Degods are next!)

Closing thoughts

We’re so early. How do I know? Spend a few minutes using these tools and gazing over the landscape. Many of these tools are still janky af whenever you want to do something. We also know normies aren’t here yet, b/c Ledger integration w/ Xverse hasn’t happened yet. (It’s coming.)

Like I said, we’re early.

But early is when it’s worth getting your hands dirty ‘cause it’ll pay off in the long run. What we’re seeing emerge are the foundations of dapps on Bitcoin, and it’s going to be fucking beautiful. 🌞

P.S. Fuck. I forgot Gamma.io 💀

“Oh”, I said as I put on my traveller hat. “I’m a mfin’ sat hunter. You better ask somebody.”

Sat hunting. What is it, and why is it so lucrative? If you’ve got some $BTC sitting in your wallet somewhere, you might have some rare sats (aka satoshis) in your pocket. So what’s a sat? If you break down 1 $BTC, it’s divisible into 100 million sats. It’s like cents for the dollar.

“Cool. So what’s a rare sat, and why should I care?”

History: Why Ordinals over everything

Ordinals can be tokens or jpegs

The Ordinal protocol took an entire community of Bitcoin purists to come out w/ pitchforks. So what’s all this wizardry about? Let’s break it down real quick.

Ordinals. Think of Ordinal Theory as a new way for us to be able to number and track sats sequentially. The implications for collectors are massive, because all of a sudden, we can start collecting specific individual sats w/ variant values.

It’s easier to compare sat hunting to coin collecting, or even philately (stamps), both of which I was seriously into. (I once got a job in a mailroom at the NHS in England so I could collect more stamps.)

Why is rare sat hunting lucrative? When you’ve got one group of buyers and another group of sellers, you’ve got a market. And even within a highly niche market, that minute segment can actually prove to be incredibly lucrative. And rare sats aren’t niche; we’re just early.

Imagine you’ve been coming home and dumping spare change into jars and bowls and cups and what not. Then one day, Alice comes over and spots a rare penny on top of your bowl. She’s convinced it’s worth a cool $500. A penny that’s worth $500? What gives?

“Well, Lincoln used this specific penny to purchase the ticket to the show where he was assassinated.” Yeah right. How tf can you trace a penny’s origin that way?

Well, with sats, you can.

Btw, the historical value as well as the rarity factor are only the base layer of where our game begins. Now let’s say Alice has found an entire bag of these rare coins, and you take them outside. You run into a famous artist. The artist takes a black marker and starts doodling on your coins.

What’s the value of each coin now? (Dali actually drew on the back of his checks so that restaurants would never cash them, since his doodles are way more valuable than the monetary value of these checks once cashed.)

One of Dali’s famous restaurant checks

This, for me, is where the real fun of ordinals versus dumb-contract NFTs begins: It’s that extra layer to perceived value that introduces an even more complex layer of gamification for collectors.

And it’s all happening on Bitcoin. We’re coming back full circle to the Godchain, bb!

Rare, Uncommon, etc.: The Breakdown

Because Casey Rodarmor proposed the Ordinals numbering system, we now use what’s called the Rodarmor Rarity Index to assess the rarity of satoshis. The image below offers a quick breakdown.

Source: ord.io

The infographic is pretty self-explanatory, so let’s dive a bit deeper.

• Early blocks. Sats from Block 9 are the earliest sats in circulation. The earlier blocks have not moved, so unless Satoshi makes a comeback, these are the earliest.

  Sats from Block 9 are from when Satoshi sent Hal Finney 10 $BTC, meaning these sats are from the first non-Satoshi transaction (tx).  

• Blocks related to historical events. An obvious example is Pizza Sats, from the 2 Papa John’s pizza purchases w/ 10,000 $BTC back in the early days. We can think up various examples and get creative here.

  (What about the sats that Mt. Gox might release 1 day? What will they be worth? What about Silk Road sats? Sats used by Ross Ulbricht? You get the idea.)

• Sats with a personal numeric significance. Maybe it’s your birthday sat or wedding day anniversary, and you want to get a sat for your SO. (Sick gift idea btw.) Maybe it’s your favorite string of numbers, or an old phone number.

• Rare blocks. We already covered Block 9. Block 78 is the first block to be mined by someone other than Satoshi, and that’s Hal. Block 69 is a special numbered block, for obvious reasons. Block 420. Block 69420. What else?

• Sat names. Like the domain name craze from the heydays of the Internet, sat names are going wild rn. Careful tho: You can mint multiple sats w/ the same name, but only the first is valid, so make sure to check the Unisat Marketplace for availability first before inscribing any sat names.

A quick note on rarity: The rarity of some sat types is actually skewed. For instance, pizza sats are historical, but they comprise 10,000 $BTC, which adds up to a lot of sats.

Block 9 sats are historical too, but not as scarce as people make them out to be. Some of them are (e.g., “First Transaction”), but like we covered earlier, not all sats are the same, so hopefully we get some clarity around circulating figures soon.

Btw check out these uncommon sats being sold by legendary sat hunter Nullish.

Hunting for rare sats: The steps

There are many ways to skin a cat. But in this case, let’s explore all the ways. Sat hunting isn’t a one-and-done approach, so let’s start with the most obvious place to look:

Your wallet.

First step: Check your wallet for rare sats

It’s real easy to check your wallet for sats. Here’s how.

1. Visit https://www.ordinalhub.com/sat-scanner.

2. Input your $BTC wallet address.

3. That’s it 😂

Hunting for rare-sat ordinals:

This approach only works if you can identify the project in question. Some of them have labels, as shown below.

1. To begin, visit http://ord.io.

2. Find a rare sat you like, and click through.

3. Copy the Inscription Number.

4. Visit ME on BTC, and look for the project.

5. Paste the id into the project search.

6. Voilà! You have your sat.

Something else I like to do: I find a rare sat that piques my interest, and I browse through the owner’s wallet. That way, I might be able to find some lesser-known projects I’m not privy to.

Buying from miners and selling (arbitrage):

This site lists rare sats being sold off by miners: https://www.f2pool.com/user/auction/item-list

A while back, I had a convo w/ someone who said that if you're buying rare sats as an investment, it may not be the greatest idea, since uncommons could get diluted if people keep farming them as hard as they are rn. It’s an interesting thesis, but I don’t think it’ll play out.

Rare sats will win hard, and they’ll win big. It’s an extra layer of gamification that we just don’t have w/ dumb contracts. Digital artifacts are so much more fun for collectors, and the perceived value and appeal is readily apparent.

Hunting for rare sats via exchanges (The Nullish way):

I first found out about rare sats after reading Zk and Nullish’s piece (linked below). The outlined approach goes like this:

1) Send your $BTC to an exchange (e.g., Kucoin).

2) Withdraw your $BTC to Sparrow Wallet. (Sparrow Wallet lets you extract sat ranges.)

3) Copy the UTXO.

4) Paste in http://ordinals.com to see if you got anything. Rinse and repeat!

Link to Zk and Nullish’s piece is below. It’s a solid read.

Ordinals, Inscriptions, and Rare Sats - Oh my!

zk X NULLISH x Tony Tafuro - Scroll all the way down to skip to the alpha

zkshark.substack.com/p/ordinals-inscriptions-and-rare-sats

So what are the risks? (Shoutout to @billyrestey for this.)

• You’re giving up custody to an exchange, albeit temporarily. If you send $BTC to Binance, and Binance halts $BTC withdrawals, game over.

• Withdrawing and depositing multiple times within a short period can get your account locked. Getting your account locked with your $BTC inside can be gut-wrenching.

• Multiple tx’s adds up quick. Do this multiple times, and fees will quickly climb to hundreds of dollarinos.

Another major caveat: Now that everyone knows about this approach, it’s getting much harder to accumulate rare sats this way. Apparently exchanges are finding out too.

You’ve found special sats. Extraction in 10 steps.

This is tricky ngl. The tech for extracting rare sats is still janky af. For this step, it’s easiest to use Sparrow wallet, so make sure you’ve got this set up. You can use another wallet like Hiro, but there are extra steps involved, and I’m a proponent of simplicity, so Sparrow it is.

1. Click on “UTXOs” on the left-hand sidebar, and right-click on the tx you want to check under “Output”. Then “Copy Transaction Output”.

2. Visit ordinals.com and paste the Transaction Output and search to view the sat ranges.

   Note: The “value” at the top is the cumulative value of all the listed sat ranges. If you click through each one individually, you can check their specific value.

3. For our example, let’s say we’re targeting the sat: 684631737843796. Therefore, it’s within the third sat range shown below.

4. This is what we have to figure out: How many sats are in the previous ranges before the target sat?

   We can do so by subtracting the end of the ranges from the start ranges until we reach the target. Once we reach the target range, subtract the target sat from the starting sat.

5. There are 1742 sats up to our rare sat (i.e., 600 + 600 + 542). We want to remove 1742 sats, leaving Sat 684631737843796 at the start of a new range.

   Note: Sats are indexed from 0.

6. Sparrow lets you freeze a UTXO at any point, guaranteeing the safety of your sats. Now select the UTXO containing the rare sat, and click "Send Selected..." on the bottom-right corner.

7. This is where your Math Scientist degree comes in handy.

   We’re sending 3 tx’s.

   Tx i) Send 1742 sats back to an exchange or a personal wallet.

   Tx ii) Send the rare sat + 9999 sats thereafter to a fresh wallet you’ve set up for your rare sats.

   Tx iii) Send the remaining sats back to an exchange or to a personal wallet.

8. Label your outputs with numbers. This makes sorting easier after creating the tx, because, for some reason, they’re randomized! 😂

9. Click "Create Transaction" until it matches the correct order (i.e., 1, 2, 3). To wit:

   4. Tx i) 1742 sats

      Tx ii) the rare sat, followed by 9999 sats

      Tx iii) The remainder

That’s it!

Important Notes:

• Do NOT use Excel to calculate ranges.

• Should you find a rare sat in the first 330 sat range, you need to add a second input.

• I fudged extraction the first time, so I had to go w/ another number 😂 

Shoutout to @itsfranken for the free education on Sparrow wallet extraction.

Final Thoughts on rare sats

I hate saying it, but when it comes to rare sats and ordinals, we are early. We’re at the forefront of something magical, and as explorers, we’re building, engaging, and FAFO’ing. Bet that the sat extraction portion of this guide will be outdated within a matter of weeks, thanks to projects like Rare Sats Society, which is working on tooling to make rare sat extraction easy. (Check out sating.io.)

I’m sure I missed a lot of critical information in this piece. The space is changing way too fast to keep up w/ everything in a single guide, especially this early on. But some sources will remain critical and evergreen. So if you really want to dig deep into rare sats, I strongly encourage you to read the source material by Casey. It’s highly accessible.

Promise 🧡