Welcome to the flarnchain newsletter, brought to you each and every week like an atomic clock. If you are new here (I think there were at least two new sign ups last week), welcome! I haven't gotten any new readers for a while. I think the issue is that I don't do a great job promoting the newsletter. Or perhaps the content isn't all that great.

Regardless, I continue to publish this thing, and will continue to publish this thing for at least another 9 years (according to the flarnmap, which many of you have hopefully seen by now). This week was a big week for crypto. Just today (this evening actually) news has spread that a spot Bitcoin ETF was cleared by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The rulemaking is an interesting read, and you can find it here: https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/sro/nysearca/2024/34-99306.pdf

If you don't want to read the whole 22 page report, I've taken a screenshot of one of the most interesting paragraphs in the release.. but actually there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there. Read it if you get a chance.

If you don't know what ETFs are, or what Bitcoin is... I'll try to explain really quickly:

1. ETFs are Exchange Traded Funds, and they are ways things that aren't stocks can trade like stocks. For example, bundles of stocks that provide broad market exposure... and now Bitcoin.

2. Explaining Bitcoin in a sentence or two is kind of challenging... It's a digital currency that is governed by a set of rules called the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin is also a public, permissionless blockchain, which tracks all of the transactions on the Bitcoin network. There's a cryptocurrency, a protocol, and a network. These things all work hand-in-hand to be what is known as Bitcoin. I think I will just keep rambling, so I'll work on this little elevator speech of "what is Bitcoin" later.

Dang I wasn't really going to talk about it, but now that the fact has set in that Bitcoin ETFs are a thing, my mind is racing. What is going to happen when fund managers can now include spot Bitcoin, as approved by the SEC in their holdings in an incredibly frictionless manner? Folks are going to want to allocation 1%, 2% maybe even 10% of their retirement portfolios to the Bitcoin ETF, and they will be able to do that easily.

With the pending Bitcoin halving, this could cause serious supply shock. I don't think the halving is priced in because I actually don't think it's possible for the halving to be fully priced in. There will be a moment where 12.5 Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes... and then all of the sudden only 6.25 Bitcoins will be created every 10 minutes. How does a market price in such a thing? Its known... but as soon as it happens, there's less new Bitcoin available, that is a structural thing. It will change the market structure, and presumably... the price? Why was that a question?

You might be asking yourself "why is flarn having trouble forming coherent thoughts right now?" Well, I have an answer for you. And that answer is:

Proto Towers

This is a project I've been working on since December 23. Besides the holidays, family, and my work of toiling away in the fiat mines, I've also been devising a large art project called Towers. It's something that get's me incredibly excited, and keeps me up at night thinking about how awesome it's going to be. It's going to be awesome because I plan to turn this collection of art into a Coffee Table book, a New York Times Best Selling Coffee Table book of Towers, in fact. When I go to bed, I lay awake thinking about various layouts and configurations of my art.

I've been thinking way too much about this book. It's on my mind constantly. So I decided to just start doing something about it, by creating a collection of art on the Stargaze blockchain called Proto Towers. This was a practical step to getting what's in my brain out into the world. These Proto Towers are actually not Towers... they are in fact precursors to Towers. Towers is a whole different thing all together, but it's similar in the sense that it's art of towers (like skyscrapers and monoliths and megaliths and stuff).

The thing about Towers is that it's all hand drawn art, and it's a collaboration between me and anyone who wanted to draw in my Towers notebook. Well, Proto Towers is essentially the same sort of thing, but instead of drawings in a notebook, it's artworks minted to a blockchain. Instead of a finite number of pages, this blockchain has (for all intents and purposes) an infinite number of pages. Instead of requiring someone to be near me to collaborate... we just need to connect on the internet. And connect we have. Over the holidays I started minting Proto Towers to the Stargaze blockchain. I listed them for sale using the following pricing formula:

That's it. So if the ID Number was 1, I would list 1 for sale at 11 Stars. The price of Stars was 3 cents at the time, so I was listing these things for 33 cents, then 36 cents, and so on. Well, turns out some people who saw these listings liked my towers, so they started buying them and bidding up the price. They were creating bots to buy them as soon as I listed them. There was no chance for anyone else to get these things, and if you read Flarnchain Newsletter #153, you are aware that this collection was intended to be a whitelist collection, a way to collect addresses of people who are "whitelisted" for the launch of my Towers collection.

Anyways, because these bots and whales were bidding up the price and buying pieces before other people could have a chance to buy, I devised strategies to wash them out. For example, I started drawing 8x8 pixel proto towers, which take way less time, and started bulk listing those to see if I could break through the buying pressure and give other people a chance to participate.

This behavior seemed, initially, to have the opposite effect. It seemed that people wanted them even more, resulting in more interest, kind of catapulting the project into a price range and interest level that I wasn't really expecting to happen so quickly.

Then something magical happened. Other artists whom I admire in the Stargaze art community began approaching me with praise for my art. People were also making drawings of their own Proto Towers, and sharing them with me. This gave me an idea. This whitelist collection had now become this little community of artists all creating and inspiring each other. There are now many artists who have added art to the Proto Towers collection, and many of those pieces are far better than anything I could have drawn. These artists have their own followings which has caused a lot of interest from various corners of the Stargaze art community. It's been quite an amazing little journey, and it has just begun.

TLDR: Proto Towers is doing quite well! There's lots of people making and adding art to the collection. I can barely keep up with collaborations during my off hours, so I'm sleeping a lot less than before. I probably need to communicate a bit better about my timeline and ability to accomplish all of these things. I keep saying - - sure! I can get that done in the next 24 hours, - -when I should probably be saying - sure! I can get that done in the next week or so.

What next? A few things:

1. Proto Towers is first and foremost a whitelist collection to get a sufficiently large whitelist so the mint of Towers is successful.

2. Proto Towers is secondly an art collaboration platform, and it's incredibly fun to collaborate with other artists.

3. There's an insane amount of work to be done to create the Towers collection. While the base is all hand drawn and painted art that I (and my friends and family) already have created, the remaining ~ 9,500 pieces will need to be derived from this art. This is a huge task.

Anyways, creating Proto Towers has been one of the most fun times I've ever had creating art, and it's in a digital format. I would never in my wildest dreams thought pixel art was going to give me that feeling. My primary and favorite form of art is watercolors. The problem is you can't just sit down and do water colors. With pixel art, there's prep work, no mess, no cleanup. It means you can just... put what's in your brain on the digital canvas, and that's what I do.

I don't really think I said much. I think I had to ramble on for a while tonight and get this out of my head. I also think I need to slow down a bit. I'm burning the candle at both ends and I need to get some sleep.

I must do a few things to finish this newsletter:

Market Animal

This week's market animal is a dog . a three headed dog in fact (known as a Cerberus). There's a cryptocurrency called Cerberus where one of the holders of a whole lot of it asked me to make a drawing of a Cerberus tower. That's pretty cool. I started it off with drawing a puppy Cerberus

52 Weeks of Huahua

Today marks the 6th week of 52 Weeks of Huahua.

I think I purchased around 100k Huahua this week, which is up from the previous week. Huahua's price is way down since last week, so I bought a lot more.

I don't have the energy to update my tracking chart.

next week

next week is going to be back to regularly scheduled programming, and will be less chaotic, way less wordy, and organized like past newsletters.

That's all for tonight.

Hope you have a great rest of your week.

Cheers!

-Flarn

🤘🤘