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GM GM, busy week leading up to time off, so lets dive in.
Distribution of POAPs celebrating 1 year have been challenging, a ton of lessons learned in there about how to get it to over 70 people but in the end it will be worth it once those people collect and we can run raffles. It does have me thinking about new distribution methods for Year 2 of the newsletter as that is over 200 people and current method of emailing each person one by one is brutal but not losing hope. For those that got the email, I promise it is me and it is real. To get the POAP you just have to enter a wallet (no connecting) and that is it, super secure airdropping.
If you are an onchain collector of the podcast, I have money you can earn for submitting podcast guest suggestions and you can vote on who gets to be on the podcast next. This is a new experiment I am trying out (borrowing it from Rehash podcast). The top five places will get a prize and it is free to partake. Suggestions are open for a week and voting open up immediately for a week right after.
Create with Behind The Screen With Gramajo on Uplink
Moving around some content due to some priorities and trip. The Coup Of Grace Artist feature will now drop next weekend. I moved up my podcast episode with the creators of Nounspace to early this week so people could listen to the podcast before their voting on their prop in Nouns. You can check that out here when it drops.
Optimism powers many of the L2 chains that most of us are familiar with Zora, Base and more. One of the more annoying things about being on multiple L2s is the lack of being able to use Eth across all these networks. It is still really early days with all this tech. We recently saw payments to whatever denomination because our wallets do the swap for us live with minimal impact. Now any OP based L2 you can choose which asset to pay with without a confirmation as well. All these little incremental changes keep abstracting these decisions for users which will make onboarding easier. If you dont have ETH on OP but have some on Zora from your rewards, you can just pay using that. No longer do you need to think about switching networks and checking your balances and it is these strides in the experience that make all of our lives better but also easier for the masses in the future.
I love me some rare pepes and this month is as spicy as I can remember in a long time. This gives me vibes of season 8 rare pepes where many of the same artist below also dropped their pieces on XCP. What do you think? Any artist you are interested in more. I got my eyes on:
ACK
Grant Yun
Jack Butcher
Jack Kaido
Jake Fried
It is no secret that I am a big believer in the hypersub team. To me it feels like they have been on a tear the whole summer, delivering week in, week out some of the best features or desired features for their users. There are some companies where being onchain is an afterthought but others where being onchain means they explore new functionality and new method of using the blockchain to their advantage to separate themselves from their web2 counterpart. Being able to redeem all your rewards across all your referral programs with one click is amazing especially for someone like me who has over 24 subs.
new on hypersub.xyz: unified rewards you can now withdraw rewards from all your memberships with 1 click it pays to be early, it pays to believe
If you recall from last weeks issue, predicative markets are hot right now. Well the king of kings is back to make sure you remember they exist. Polymarket launched their own election market app which reminds me of if FiveThirtyEight had an iOS app, which is a huge compliment on my end. I consider this a test run for Polymarket to show that building a full app covering not just the election but more.
The Polymarket election APP is finally here.
Daimo has been one of my favorite apps to cover in the past because it is trying to solve a simple but very real problem when you gather a bunch of people from all over world for events. How are we going to split the bill? It sounds so silly but not everyone has Venmo, Paypal, Wechat etc. USDC sending via your wallet seems simple ish but not as intuitive as you would think. Daimo is not just after this problem of course, they are trying to compete with Venmo or be the onchain version of this. They recently announced Landline which is a way to link your bank to get USDC on the app even faster than before. This new feature gets them even one step closer to competing with the top dogs in web2 while also having a web3 advantage.
Introducing Landline The fastest way to turn USD in your bank to USDC on-chain. Available only in the US. More locales coming soon.
Speaking of politics our current administration and frankly all of them have been negative or not active enough with crypto. We have been going after way too many devs in recent months and that is not the stance I would like our government to take. So when I saw some anonymous account donated a decent chunk of change for the tornado cash dev, I was really happy to see this. Whatever your stance is on all other aspects of politics, going after the developer of a decentralized tool is not the way to go. As mentioned before, this is the equivalant of going after the creator of cell phones or emails because sometimes terrorist's use these tools.
Thank you to the generous anon who donated 99.5 ETH to Roman's legal defense on /juicebox. Open source is not a crime. https://supercast.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmeQ9cjukSmXBV2YwK9YMVaCAGW7H9yQzxQdVFwWxTyoy1?filename=Screenshot-2024-09-29-at-10.11.45-AM.png
Robinhood is thinking about launching a stablecoin. As Valko, rightfully called out on his newsletter, the number 1 and 2 positions are locked up with Tether and USDC/Circle taking those spots. Paypal is making a strong push for this at number 3 and with over 1 billion in PYUSD market cap. But the reason why I think Robinhood getting in the mix has my interest is that Robinhood is a proven disruptor in the space. PayPal used to have this title back in the day but post Venmo acquisition I don't really know if they have it in them. Robinhood on the other hand is currently disrupting the credit churn group with their catch all card and if they did release a stablecoin I really do think they can make a strong run at #3 or more. Stablecoins are good business so I am sure this space will remain hot.
Several trading firms, including Robinhood and Revolut, have reportedly been considering launching a native stablecoin.
I recently saw a post from Tim Reilly that got me thinking. I think this is the first time I've seen a big 4 league partner with a Farcaster brand in this case Bracket. The other was I hadn't heard of Breakaway before which seems to be another Topshot alternative. Back in 2021 Topshot was the shit and it almost got me to get into NFTs. It did help me understand the concept back then which is great but now I am just glad I didn't get into topshot. Topshot did a ton of things wrong and many in the community pivoted away from it as their sole NFT purchases. Some never got back in after being burned and others just moved on to other NFTs/PFPs. Regardless, it brought a ton of people into the NFT space. I hope Bracket incorporates some of the lessons from topshot into their model but either way, congrats to the Bracket team on getting this collab.
🚨 Attn: Farcaster! Bracket is thrilled to partner with NHL Breakaway™️ to gift packs of NHL collectibles to 1,000 casters. Breakaway is the official Digital Collectibles Marketplace of the NHL, where fans own + trade hockey moments. Let's welcome NHL to Farcaster. 🏒🥅 https://api.bracket.game/frame/nhl
Say what you want about Solana but they really know what to go after. Solana Pay may sound like a dumb idea to you but back in the early/mid 2010s, paying with Bitcoin was all the rage. The rally call back then was to use it to pay for things irl. It worked and it worked well, this type of guerilla marketing gets normies to pay attention. Solana Pay is going to be very effective at onboarding users or at least getting them to pay attention or ask questions and when they do the first words they will hear are Solana, not Ethereum, no Bitcoin. And the experience of speed will be impressive to them. Now Solana just needs to figure out how to stay up.
XCOPY season still hasn't stopped in case you were wondering.
This week Gamma has four new drops coming to ordinals through their Artist Ambassador program. Gamma has been really knocking it out of the park the last couple of months on getting more artist into ordinals which is great to see. With Ol1y and Empress Trash involved in the mix of selecting artists, I am going to guess these are going to be some really cool drops.
Big Jack Kaido fan and I have been really enjoying what Avant Arte has been doing with the web3 space and making spend money. This collab has me super excited to see what Jack Kaido will be cooking. Soon we will all need way more wall space haha.
More info soon
Painting the digital cave – Jack Kaido is an anonymous digital artist. His digital paintings have been sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and one painting is in the International Space Station.
Tor and Tails are merging!
Receipts teasing us with some new functionality, might need those Meta x Raybans
Onceupon team revived as Cove protocol has me going down a rabbit hole. Group payments solved?
Gary Gensler gets ripped a new one.
4% back on Gnosis card.
$RARE announces Base bridge.
Channels are changing on Farcaster but Hypersub, Moxie and others have you covered!
Icebreaker (LinkedIn alternative) now supports skills endorsements.
Rug.fun not sure what this is but keep your eye on it.
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.
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Gramajo
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GM ☕️ 👽 New Issue, let’s dive in 📥 👉🏻 Abstraction of L2s is here & why it matters 👉🏻 Notable Pepes are back stronger than ever, getting S8 vibes of Fake Rares 👉🏻 Onchain referral program on steroids, hypersub drops new features 👉🏻 Polymarket drops a new app & why they’re gearing up for post elections 👉🏻 Can the NHL learn from top shots mistakes? 👉🏻 Why Solana pay is a big deal You can read more 👇🏻 https://paragraph.xyz/@0xgramajo/87