In the years when the 18th century grew into the 19th century, a former diplomat lived in an apartment above a bakery in the center of The Hague. He was addicted to coffee, and often had some in his room in the evening. One day, he set his coffee, with cream and sugar, on top of the heater and went to sleep. The next morning, he found his coffee mug with a congealed substance in it. He tried to eat it and was pleasantly surprised. When his doctor later told him to not have coffee anymore, he asked the baker to make candies to his serendipitously found recipe. Even after Baron Hop's death in 1808, the baker kept making the candies and later they became known as Haagse Hopjes, or little Hops from The Hague. To this day, these are the signature candies of the political heart of The Netherlands.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I am starting, as promised recently, a series on (meme)coins (see glossary below). Not because I like to talk about memecoins, but because I have experimented with the phenomenon to see how poets and other artists can use them to add to their income stream stack. I want to start the series with the first coin I launched: the $hopje. I named the coin after my hometown's signature candy, of course, in my journey to serendipitously find ways to make them work.

Rewarding creativity

After launching the coin, I had to find a way to make it work for me. Just creating it, and cashing in on the sniper fees (see glossary below), is already a bit of fun, but it's rather meaningless. So, coming down from the high of creating my first coin, I was thinking about a way to use it. I settled on making it a community coin. Not sure if that is a thing, but it made sense to me calling it that. I had gathered a community of poets and other creative spirits around me on Farcaster, and I wanted to use this coin to inspire them to create. The first step was to create a token gate (see glossary below) to the trpplffct channel on Farcaster. If you want to become a member there, you have to hold a certain amount of the $hopje coin. And only members could cast in the channel. Then, I organised a weekly creativity prompt in the channel, asking people to share their results in the channel. They did. Then, I would distribute 1M of the coin to the participants using a now sunset tool called rounds. It was a nice setup, and even though there was no real monetary value to be gained, people liked the idea of being rewarded with some kind of points. Even though there was nothing to be done with the points.

I hoped that by implementing the gate, people would have an urge to buy the coin, which would help it not only increase in value and so help the holders, but it would also mean that I would earn some trading fees. The popularity of the trpplffct channel on Farcaster was never immense, and that value flow did not materialise. But we had some fun, and the value of $hopje has been relatively stable. I still believe this could work, but the buy-incentive must be attractive enough. Even though the creative prompts had a loyal crowd, it needed a bigger crowd for this use of the coin to succeed.

Later I have created another community coin, $calliope, named after the muse of poetry. I launched it without mentioning it much and  use it to reward contributors to the poetry channel on Farcaster.

Have you done something similar? Share your experiences in the comments, please.

PS: The image in the header is AI generated, using the same prompt as I used to generate the image I used for the $hopje coin.

Help me make more posts, by buying me a cofffee once, or a couple of coffees each month. You can do that via Buy Me A Coffee or my Hypersub "Trpplr".

Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

https://hypersub.xyz

memecoin

"The ERC-20 introduces a standard for Fungible Tokens, in other words, they have a property that makes each Token be exactly the same (in type and value) as another Token. For example, an ERC-20 Token acts just like the ETH, meaning that 1 Token is and will always be equal to all the other Tokens."

From the ethereum.org website

The ERC-20 standard is used on Ethereum-based blockchains for creating coins. They follow the standard, and are very similar in that respect, but they are not always used in the same way. They tend to be called memecoins, or shitcoins. In this series of posts, I will use terms such as community coin, culture coin, content coin, art coin, creator coin, and so on, based on the way I use them. But they are all ERC-20 tokens.

sniper fee

When you launch a coin, there are traders that are betting on you at launch. They buy up some of your coin, in the hope it goes up and they get rich. To make that work, they have to do that in the first seconds of your coin's existence. In the crypto world, these people are called snipers, and you can set an elevated buying fee for them. As you get a fee for each trade of your coin, you will also get it for the trades the snipers make, and as their fee is elevated, you can earn a bit more. I've earned in between 75 and 200 Euro per coin launch in sniper fees. I am not sure how this works, but I don't think it is the same for everyone, and snipers have their algorithms for buying in or not.

token gate

If you limit access to something online or onchain, such as a community, a blog post, a book, you can use any type of token (an NFT, a coin, etcetera) to serve as key to that gate. For example, if you hold 500.000 $hopje, you can become a member of the trpplffct channel on Farcaster and cast into that channel.

In the years when the 18th century grew into the 19th century, a former diplomat lived in an apartment above a bakery in the center of The Hague. He was addicted to coffee, and often had some in his room in the evening. One day, he set his coffee, with cream and sugar, on top of the heater and went to sleep. The next morning, he found his coffee mug with a congealed substance in it. He tried to eat it and was pleasantly surprised. When his doctor later told him to not have coffee anymore, he asked the baker to make candies to his serendipitously found recipe. Even after Baron Hop's death in 1808, the baker kept making the candies and later they became known as Haagse Hopjes, or little Hops from The Hague. To this day, these are the signature candies of the political heart of The Netherlands.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I am starting, as promised recently, a series on (meme)coins (see glossary below). Not because I like to talk about memecoins, but because I have experimented with the phenomenon to see how poets and other artists can use them to add to their income stream stack. I want to start the series with the first coin I launched: the $hopje. I named the coin after my hometown's signature candy, of course, in my journey to serendipitously find ways to make them work.

Rewarding creativity

After launching the coin, I had to find a way to make it work for me. Just creating it, and cashing in on the sniper fees (see glossary below), is already a bit of fun, but it's rather meaningless. So, coming down from the high of creating my first coin, I was thinking about a way to use it. I settled on making it a community coin. Not sure if that is a thing, but it made sense to me calling it that. I had gathered a community of poets and other creative spirits around me on Farcaster, and I wanted to use this coin to inspire them to create. The first step was to create a token gate (see glossary below) to the trpplffct channel on Farcaster. If you want to become a member there, you have to hold a certain amount of the $hopje coin. And only members could cast in the channel. Then, I organised a weekly creativity prompt in the channel, asking people to share their results in the channel. They did. Then, I would distribute 1M of the coin to the participants using a now sunset tool called rounds. It was a nice setup, and even though there was no real monetary value to be gained, people liked the idea of being rewarded with some kind of points. Even though there was nothing to be done with the points.

I hoped that by implementing the gate, people would have an urge to buy the coin, which would help it not only increase in value and so help the holders, but it would also mean that I would earn some trading fees. The popularity of the trpplffct channel on Farcaster was never immense, and that value flow did not materialise. But we had some fun, and the value of $hopje has been relatively stable. I still believe this could work, but the buy-incentive must be attractive enough. Even though the creative prompts had a loyal crowd, it needed a bigger crowd for this use of the coin to succeed.

Later I have created another community coin, $calliope, named after the muse of poetry. I launched it without mentioning it much and  use it to reward contributors to the poetry channel on Farcaster.

Have you done something similar? Share your experiences in the comments, please.

PS: The image in the header is AI generated, using the same prompt as I used to generate the image I used for the $hopje coin.

Help me make more posts, by buying me a cofffee once, or a couple of coffees each month. You can do that via Buy Me A Coffee or my Hypersub "Trpplr".

Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy

Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

https://buymeacoffee.com

Subscribe to Trpplr on Hypersub

Trpplrs are sending ripples of poetry through the world, to make it more fun. As a Trpplr, you will get: & special poetry drops from me and up-and-comin...

https://hypersub.xyz

memecoin

"The ERC-20 introduces a standard for Fungible Tokens, in other words, they have a property that makes each Token be exactly the same (in type and value) as another Token. For example, an ERC-20 Token acts just like the ETH, meaning that 1 Token is and will always be equal to all the other Tokens."

From the ethereum.org website

The ERC-20 standard is used on Ethereum-based blockchains for creating coins. They follow the standard, and are very similar in that respect, but they are not always used in the same way. They tend to be called memecoins, or shitcoins. In this series of posts, I will use terms such as community coin, culture coin, content coin, art coin, creator coin, and so on, based on the way I use them. But they are all ERC-20 tokens.

sniper fee

When you launch a coin, there are traders that are betting on you at launch. They buy up some of your coin, in the hope it goes up and they get rich. To make that work, they have to do that in the first seconds of your coin's existence. In the crypto world, these people are called snipers, and you can set an elevated buying fee for them. As you get a fee for each trade of your coin, you will also get it for the trades the snipers make, and as their fee is elevated, you can earn a bit more. I've earned in between 75 and 200 Euro per coin launch in sniper fees. I am not sure how this works, but I don't think it is the same for everyone, and snipers have their algorithms for buying in or not.

token gate

If you limit access to something online or onchain, such as a community, a blog post, a book, you can use any type of token (an NFT, a coin, etcetera) to serve as key to that gate. For example, if you hold 500.000 $hopje, you can become a member of the trpplffct channel on Farcaster and cast into that channel.