If you're enjoying my writing, please share my newsletter with your friends in crypto and join the /Area51 channel on Farcaster and my Telegram group.
Gramajo's Corner
GM GM, this past week I dropped a new artist feature with Yungwknd, in case you missed it I am linking it below.
Yungwknd
If you're enjoying my writing, please share my newsletter with your friends in crypto and join the /Area51 channel on Farcaster and my Te...
Currently working on two podcast interviews and going to try and squeeze in one more written interview before my trip to Japan. As a reminder, when reading this newsletter, on the right hand side there is a table of content so you can go to the parts you like. I don't try to include too much filler but it is there for you if needed.
I've recently been exploring DAOs a bit more to understand them and to make a solid assessment of where we are with DAOs in our current state of web3. It has been fun learning about new communities and how they function. Something that stood out to me is how much activity there is and if you are in more than 1 (I went from zero to five in a couple of months) it can be hard to keep up with one centralized location. Seems like an easy win for any devs out there.
Long term, I am dropping some shortened videos of my long podcast episodes on Youtube to see if that works better for the algo vs a 1+ hour video. Other items on my head are finding a sponsor, finding an artist to collab with for 2 year celebration NFT and IRL meet ups this fall. Let's dive into the recap.
Web3
An interesting week in web3. This week we saw two prime examples where decentralization was at the center of it all. Early in the week, someone got this punk ape for 10ETH for context last sold punk apes are 620ETH, 3.3kETH. They achieved this by reading the damn rules essentially and if you haven't learned, code don't play games. A fractionalized ape created on a dysfunctional site called niftex was taken under the feet of the owners of the owners, only two saw or where paying attention, one being gmoney. But the rebuttal did not meet the requirements to stop the whole thing so this person came out a bandit. Now some people are pissed, rightfully so, some applaud the effort and cleverness. I am somewhere in the middle, on one hand, I respect the hustle, on the other, since the site went down, rebutting was done at the contract level and not many people even know how to do that so as the French say c'est la vie.
Today happened one of the biggest crypto punk heists of all time. Someone with a lot of patience and knowledge just bought ape 2386 for 10 ETH.
How
How
2,187
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum and I promise this will make sense soon. Some person in a community made some death threats to Jesse and the Base team. What the person failed to realize is Jesse lives in Oakland and we don't fuck around (JK). But they did fuck up, Jesse is the creator of Base and worked at Coinbase and overall is well plugged in and connected in web3. The whole community/pfp project they all belonged to was removed/banned/restricted from using Discord. The actions of one person should not lead to the immediate ban/attack on a whole community. Which is why I am for decentralized tools, tech and software.
ICYMI: @base TEAM BANNED @kemonokaki HOLDERS FROM ITS @discord SERVER AFTER AT LEAST ONE OF THEM MADE DEATH THREATS - @kemonokaki/@OekakiConnect'S OWN @discord SERVER WAS BANNED AND RESTRICTIONS WERE IMPOSED ON ITS MEMBERS' ACCOUNTS
On one hand, Jesse and team should not have this much power, but they do. On the other hand, too much decentralization leads to the ape move. And most people will fall under the camp of I support these rules into they go against me, until then.
Azuki acquired anime.com. I watch anime, and if you dont wan't anime, you should give it a chance. Domains are a crazy world, I've read about startups spending 60% of their raised funds just to get a solid .com domain. Azuki venturing into this world of web2 and acquiring such a common domain makes me bullish. No clue what it is they are after with this but with the rise of anime here in the USA at worst, they should be able to recover their money from a larger web2 corporation but at best, this could be an easy gateway to get more web2 folks/weebs into web3.
SWIFT the payment system used by many around the world, connects over 11,000 institutions in more than 200 countries is exploring the usage of digital currencies probably USDC or EURC. This is some pretty big news as the adoption of even stablecoins could be a huge unlock for many banks and international folks in sending payments across borders.
We’re paving the way towards real-world solutions that will enable our members to transact interchangeably with regulated #DigitalAssets and currencies on the Swift network.
Discover what’s next on this exciting journey: okt.to/7kMhD4
#DigitalCurrencies #innovation
Discover what’s next on this exciting journey: okt.to/7kMhD4#DigitalCurrencies #innovation
It appears on Warpcast that the team is exploring some sort of way for us to prove we are humans. This is my interpretation based on the questions/polls done by the team. My personal opinion is that creating a whole net new system seems crazy, we should just leverage what the CEX offer but onchain. If I can limit the amount of websites that hold my ID or any sort of identification the better. Seems like a risky move overall, I know X was exploring this as well where you would get more features added if you gave them your ID but idk, might take some time to get over the hump for most, what do you guys think?
Steve on Warpcast
The thought of a Warpcast (not Farcaster) doing a KYC power badge is interesting. Pros - Cuts bot spam significantly - Less bots = higher quality content? Cons - Will likely hurt some countries where KYC methods are not possible - Other clients will also likely need to adopt something similar unless Warpcast makes an API, but again creates dependency on Warpcast - Bigger barrier to entry for anyone Web3 or Web2. I don’t have to do KYC on threads or any other social platform, so why would anyone non-web3 want to go through that? On the web3 side it’s an obvious barrier. Definitely a tough balancing act. imo these kinds of problems really do make a “sufficiently decentralized social graph” a hard sell to both users and devs. https://warpcast.com/mikedemarais.eth/0x60a06838
Hypersub which is a web3 native patreon alternative has had a crazy week. They recently rolled out credit card payments so for those who are subbed to my newsletter with a credit card can now be rolled over from substack to this method. The benefits of this is, people can verify how many premium subscribers are supporting me and it enables me to do some really interesting new methods of rewards for my holders since it is all onchain. On top of the new payments method, drops also support rich media fields.
Gramajo👽 on Warpcast
Excited to announce that you can now subscribe with your credit card. I can officially leave substack now. For anyone on my old credit card plan with substack, I will cancel that subscription at the end of October. If you subscribe via this new credit card method, I will airdrop you an extra two months of time to your sub for the effort! Thank you to @fabric for this new feature! https://supercast.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmP54iTYtU7ADCrKFH1Y8ZwFkvqHozNgkn74D8FakkFfmd?filename=CC.PNG https://hypersub.withfabric.xyz/s/onchainalien
Paypal/Venmo support ENS names which is a huge win for ENS and most of us. PayPay really seems to be slowly becoming a big player in the crypto space especially after there announcement of PYUSD with Solana. In total their stablecoin has over 1billion locked up in liquidity which is impressive for how recently it launched.
ens.eth on Warpcast
We’re thrilled to announce that we are now supported on PayPal & Venmo! This new feature brings the power of ENS to millions, making crypto transfers easier and more secure than ever—starting in the USA.🌐 https://blog.ens.domains/post/bringing-crypto-transfers-to-millions-with-paypal-and-venmo
Two quick ones, you can now add your Warpcast profile on Tezos for all the artist and collectors out there who use Tezos (hat tip to Blueretina).
bluretina 🎩Ⓜ️ on Warpcast
Proof of that now we can add our @warpcast profile to our @objktcom profile. Cool! ⚡️⚡️⚡️ https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/25c5bb01-f5f8-41d1-5e7b-043086359000/original
Lastly, you can now earn $higher through bcard. Which I am still super bullish on this concept and figured it was worth highlighting.
links 🏴 on Warpcast
Buying coffee? Earn $higher. Buying swag? Earn $higher. Buying some supplies to change the mfing game? Earn $higher. That’s right, the /higher /bcard is now available for all USA residents on https://app.getbcard.io/ https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/c360b2f0-5bf2-495d-6116-9ab30593a800/original
Market Insights
It is always XCOPY season, this seems to be a weekly occurrence now but another two huge sales this past week. Bad Flavour being one and the other being Mortal for 220ETH. Now if only someone can convince my wife that XCOPY art is this popular then we will have true equilibrium haha.
MORTAL #5/10 
I am quite surprised it took this long to find something like the below. In my opinion, crypto and the cannabis industry is a match made in heaven. The cannabis industry is still known to have issues with traditional finance and I feel like this is a ripe opportunity for crypto. I am hoping we see an onchain summer v3 version where instead of focusing on coffee we focus on cannabis. But for now, Cannabolt seems like a step in the right direction.
🌹 zach harris 🥀 on Warpcast
Rodeo Cannabis: Redefining the definition of “high” finance. When BTC and MJ converge. https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/c8e6f023-a4c3-4f21-d072-9c4b51bf5b00/original
Upcoming
I will be speaking on a regular basis on this Tavern (web3 X spaces alternative) in case any of you want to join to talk about art and web3. We will be on every Monday, 8am PDT.
earlymorningcrew
FB Events for Farcaster
I am uczine maxi and really enjoy underscoreXO art. This collab (my guess) has me gassed. The last couple of drops by underscoreXO have been bangers and on ordinals, so maybe this is an ordinals drop. Either way, I am interested.
OMGIDRAWEDIT is one of my favorite artist in the space and he recently has been exploring a different style and one that really lends itself to fully onchain (my wish). Keeping an eye on where this new art exploration takes him.
OMGiDRAWEDit 🦎 on Warpcast
Ok I’m not gonna lie. Feel like I’m cooking. https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/a16efc53-2025-476c-b822-bfa658d25d00/original
Meme Of The Week
I am not a dev, but as someone who has supported enterprise apps before, I definitely know this feeling haha.
the one software engineer at your company who actually understands the legacy code
Fin
Have a great rest of your week!
CIAHOAD-Rick James
If the Ambassador tier is out of reach, I now offer a free patron tier that you can check out here. I also encourage you to check out my podcast and YouTube for more content.
Want to give me feedback on this newsletter/content? Please select one of the below:
💸💸💸💸💸 - Super helpful thanks!
💸💸💸 - It was OK!
GM ☕️ Let’s dive into the recap 👉🏻 When Decentralization goes wrong, a punk ape was taken for 10E 👉🏻 A whole community was wiped away from Discord bc of the Base team. Lesson, don’t mess with ppl from Oakland 👉🏻 Azuki acquired Anime.com I share why it matters to us weebs & you 👉🏻 Swift starts accepting digital currencies 👉🏻 Social app are coming for your ID, here’s why. 👉🏻 PayPal supports ENS & how PayPal is becoming a big player in web3 More can be seen in my newsletter https://paragraph.xyz/@0xgramajo/85
gm! 1000 $DEGEN 🎩🫡
Apparently there is some ongoing drama between Base and some PFP community that got nuked by Discord Haven’t seen much about it here, but then again, I don’t know if many of us still use Discord https://twitter.com/optimizoor/status/1835300347348476067
I’ve been watching this all weekend… absolutely fascinating!!!
it took over my TL this weekend. Basically Miladys vs Base lol
i like em both cults gonna cult
milady
I’ve seen people not even deeply involved in that discord get a ban of sorts and they’re admins of their own discord potentially unable to use it 🫨
You mean the base discord?
Nope. 113 (creator of Terraforms) was just in the discord in question and ended up a global 24h mute on his account. Couldn’t write on his own discord nor reply to DMs
yup, many of us still use Discord. I blame Urbit.
5k ppl were impacted with many losing their businesses and non crypto related servers
2k server, custom bots, art, friendship, jesse’s honorary, all deleted + collateral damage. Mods @base on a 56mb gaming app need to not take themselves so seriously. It’s supposed to be a bridge, not an island. Pay your mods not “gimmie gimmies” and volunteer work with the promise of a reward.
I had to ask Grok for the fully summary! Surprisingly good resource for a niche use case.