Hi Friends,
We hope you’re all doing splendidly and we apologize for being radio silent. We were never going to be able to sustain nvo’s biblical length investment memos,. so we’re rebranding this newsletters as Heavy Hitters, aka big ideas, trends, products and more that we are jazzed about. The rub? We’ll break them down for you in a snackable, digestible way.
Will we write every week? Hopefully. Do we have a lot of balls in the air and might we miss a few? Definitely. If you want out, no stress, we’ll catch you out there in the cosmos some time 🌌🌌
For those of you down to stick around … cowabunga…
What to expect today:
That good wood
BitClout — Scam or SuperMoon
ProofofHumanity — UBI is here and avail for all (we’re serious)
Digital Emoji Real Estate
The Cowboy State 🤠
A Cottage Industry of … Lumber Memes (see what we did there)🌳
The price of lumber has been skyrocketing since last year. Like, 5x crypto-type shit. Why? In part because there’s a significant home shortage in the U.S., which in turn was driven (in part) by the pandemic induced exodus from major mets to outer suburbs.
Here’s an obligatory price chart of Lumber for you from finviz.com:
While the Federal reserve and economic agencies tell us there’s no signs of inflation we er… beg to differ (which was probably already obvious from our past writing.)
Sure, inflation may be concentrated in financial assets and release estate right now (*checks doge coin price*), but why shouldn’t that count alongside energy and food (which are also getting more expensive, we might add)? Homes are, after all, things folks need to buy.
The Bottom Line: Lots of buyers, not enough homes (see here). Hence home builders are leaping into gear, and they need lumber to build said homes.
And that’s where the memes come in. Finance twitter has gotten a sufficient kick out of the surge in lumber prices to fire up the meme mill (no, we will not stop the puns) and start generating some jaja-worthy content. We’ll leave you with a few selects:
Lumber x TikTok crossover: we’re here for it
Bears, Beets and … BitClout?
Is it a scam? Is it the future? Is it a birb? This line of questioning could apply to innumerable trends and projects right now. One project for which it’s particularly resonant however is BitClout, a new social network built on a blockchain in which you can invest directly in any user’s profile (in their “creator coin” to use on-platform technology.)
Sounds like a great new episode of black mirror right? Well, we can assure you that it’s very much non-fiction. In an interesting twist of events, one of our editors has become a minor celebrity on this nascent, controversial, crypto-native social network:
How to monetize the internet has always been a central challenge for developers, founders, and Instagram models alike, especially for individual users / ‘creators’ as they’re dubbed on BitClout. BitClout slices right through this issue, letting you effectively buy ‘stock’ in other users or yourself. (always invest in yourself first, folks)
NVO has been watching this social experiment unfold in real-time over the course of the past ~two weeks, once seeing the market cap of his coin crest as high as ~$50,000. His verdict? There definitely seems to be some good, and the community is largely positive, encouraging, and in Naval’s words “well behaved.”
Letting folks, especially creative types, self-fund their creative output seems like an inevitability and is a good thing. Equally, BitClout has already spawned a swarm of BitClout-centric developer teams and products that have raised money overnight by launching new accounts for their projects.
BitSwap is one example. NVO talked with founder Sigil Wen, who shared that the projects’ BitClout account raised millions of dollars (in market cap at least) in a matter of days. Which in turn let’s the BitSwap get to work and pay themselves way faster than a normal capital raising cycle would take. BitSwap’s value proposition? Convert BitClout (the operative on-platform currency) back into Ethereum
BitSwap’s mission speaks to one of the main critiques of BitClout. When it launched, there was no off-ramp, i.e. no way to turn the cryptocurrency BitClout (used for on-platform transaction) back into Bitcoin or USD. There were OTC markets contingent on trusted human escrow, but that’s wildly inefficient. With teams like BitSwap solving this issue, new challenges still abound.
For one, if creator coins end up falling under the SEC’s securities category, this whole project’s mission to make social media decentralized will be completely fucked. Secondly, as of late, the accounts consolidating the most wealth on-platform are, perhaps predictably, people who already had “clout” before BitClout. We’d rather see this platform actually serve up & comers, rather than Instagram models and already highly esteemed tech bros.
Lastly, is making people’s “value” hyper-tangible actually a good thing? It could definitely get problematic. If social media without built-in economics already makes some people feel worthless, what might an actually worthless creator coin make them feel?
In any case, NVO’s leading due diligence on this front. You can join him on Clubhouse on Tuesday (4/27) @ 7pm PST with other BitClouters (including FanDuel Founder and previous CEO, Nigel Eccles). Get in touch with NVO for deets.
You can also sub to a newsletter all about BitClout that NVO is working on below.
Are you human? Or are you android?
Another crypto project that has caught our eye is proofofhumanity.id. Built on the Ethereum network, the project’s goal is to build a repository of all humans that:
Doesn’t include any duplicate registrants
Only includes humans, i.e. resistant to artificial intelligence / bots etc.
A registry of unique humans has all kinds of potential applications (e.g. think voting). The more robust theory and tech behind the project lies in their “sybil-resistant” verification process, which requires new users to record a video of themselves testifying to be human, that they’re not already in the registration, and to display a unique Ethereum wallet address in the video. From there, only approved members already in the registration can vouch for folks they think are actually human.
We bring this to your radar (i) because it’s interesting and (ii) because the team building the project and community is also offering a new token alongside the project, namely UBI (short for Universal Basic Income), as a sort of cost of customer acquisition (and perhaps they’re also altruistic, says the budding optimist in us). Once approved, every hour, one UBI token “drips” into your Ethereum wallet.
As of this writing, NVO has been approved into the registry (proving he’s not just a content machine), has accrued ~$45 equivalent in free $UBI token already (since Tuesday), and has started vouching for other users. If you’re looking for a sherpa to help you get your Universal Basic Income, he’s happy to help. 💧💧💧
As to whether UBI (trading around $0.33 as of this writing) will retain its value… well we’re not sure. The proof of humanity protocol “drips” 1 UBI into your wallet every hour though, which right now is north of $8 per day. Which is actually a lot more money than more than half of humanity lives on daily (per the World Bank here).
While more UBI token issuance may dilute and depress the value, this is a cool project that has lots of potential upside. Plus, in the future, rich, charitably inclined organizations or companies could buy UBI tokens and “burn” (destroy) them to increase the value of the tokens held by average global citizens. Here’s what one of the project’s founders has to say:
Our main concern with the project? Argentinian basketball legend Manu Ginobli is verified in the registry. And he’s definitely not human.
Y.at: Digital real estate via emojis?
This next one is a little out of left field. If you’ve ever built a website, you’ll appreciate the difficulties of finding - and buying - the right domain name. They can cost a pretty penny: allegedly business.com was sold for $345M in 2007 lol. Most of us don’t carry that much in our wallet (not even our ethereum wallet), so we’re relegated to using more esoteric names.
Fortunately, with the rise of the decentralized web, a host of new companies like ENS Domains and Unstoppable Domains are opening up alongside the traditional Domain Name System, meaning that the universe of domain name choices is expanding!
One project that’s caught our eye is y.at, a provider of emoji-based domain names. You heard that right, we’re talking websites with emojis in the URL. Similar to services like Beacons and Linktree, y.at allows creators & consumers to spin up low-lift landing pages where they can connect with other third-party website URLs, crypto payment addresses, social media sites and pretty much anything else they might want to link to.
Is it gimmicky? Sure. But anything that facilitates access to websites while injecting some creativity & fun into the process is worth taking seriously. Hit us up: mark & nvo.
The Cowboy State 🤠🤠
If Covid has taught us one thing, it’s that opportunity knows no geographic boundaries. And while we’ve been bouncing between California, New York, DC (and the occasional trip to the Ozarks) over the past year, there remains one place that has escaped us so far. No, it’s not Miami — although Florida’s tax-friendly laws, weather, tech-friendly attitude and the kinda-weird cult of personality that’s formed around its mayor have made it a hotbed for investors and entrepreneurs.
No. Today we are talking about Wyoming. Yes, the same Wyoming that is responsible for producing 40% of our nation’s coal. While the Cowboy State may not oft be seen as a bastion of innovation, its libertarian spirit and laws have made it a haven for crypto investors and businesses. But whether by happenstance, realizing that its traditional economic drivers are dying, or thanks to the work of advocates like Caitlin Long, the state is leading the charge on legislation in the space by authorizing banks to lend to blockchain companies and become ‘custodians’ of digital assets.
Wyoming made headlines this past week by allowing DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, to file as LLCs effective July 1st. (Note: DAOs should be the subject of a future edition, but for now just think of them as corporate governance organizations that are overseen by code rather than a board of directors and management team). The legal status of DAOs has been murky at best in recent years, so, while it may not be perfect, we are excited to see a regulator taking a collaborative approach to monitoring crypto rather than just trying to squash it.
Hopefully we will be on the ground in Cheyenne soon. Hopefully we will be on the ground in Cheyenne soon. (*queues up Emperor of Wyoming by Neil Young*)
How’d we do today? We appreciate you,
NVO & Mark
While we have you, don’t forget to pass this along to friends who you think would be interested in whatever the hell the above was :)
M&N over & out. We love you <3