Last week I didn't get around to writing this newsletter. But at least I didn't take 35 weeks off like during the dark times, from June 19, 2024 to February 12, 2024, I did not publish a single Flarnchain Newsletter. I probably talked about this a couple weeks ago, and I'll probably talk about it again in the future.

This is a newsletter, so let's talk about the news...

You know what? On second thought. Let's not talk about the news. Let's instead talk about the markets.

Yikes. I'm not so certain I'm interested in talking about those either. That said, I think it's always good to get a dose of perspective when writing this (and for the 3 to 5 of you who read this, perhaps you haven't been following the timeless mantra of "when in doubt.... zoom out").

The current crypto market capitalization resides at about $2.8 trillion, up by about $150 billion from its local low of $2.65 trillion just a couple days ago, but deeply down from its local high of $3.9 trillion back on December 16, 2024. That high of $3.9 trillion also happens to be the all time high for the crypto markets. I'm not super interested in talking too much about my opinions of why crypto markets are down, but in general, risk-on assets (like stocks and crypto) don't do super well during periods of uncertainty, and we are currently in a period of uncertainty.

Bitcoin $BTC is currently at $83,537, which is up from the past 3 days, but not by much. I have posted the yearly chart below, and intend to work on an updated weekly chart update, similar to the one I used to publish about a year or so ago. Yearly chart is nice because it shows what happened in the past 12 months.

Ethereum $ETH is currently at $1,899, which is down in the past several weeks, by a lot. Yikes.

For good measure, here's the Cosmos Hub $ATOM yearly chart. I'm still an ATOM bull. I'm actually more bullish on ATOM now because of various reasons associated with its organization structure, and because the token itself is more distributed across more chains than ever. It's just been through a really rough patch. The thing about ATOM is that it never really had a use case... but now with efforts to use the Cosmos Hub as a router for other IBC enabled chains, things could be looking up for this project. In the short term, nothing in crypto looks good. But I'm not really in this for the short term.

Let's recap... In the past 12 months:

• Bitcoin is up by 16.9% ✅

• Ethereum is down by 52.6% ❌

• Cosmos Hub is down by 71.4% ⚰

Moving on to our new weekly feature, the 52 weeks of Coreum.

Coreum is a layer 1 blockchain connected to both the XRP (Ripple) ecosystem and the Cosmos ecosystem. It's a multipurpose blockchain that can do a lot of the same things that most modern Layer 1s can do. I became interested in Coreum because some of the people who I came across in my Cosmos adventures are Coreum natives (shoutout bibby, co-founder of The Cosmic Gumball Machine).

Here's some facts about Coreum:

1. Its biggest exchange is a "DAX" or Decentralized Autonomous Exchange called Pulsara (pulsara.io). I'm not exactly sure why it calls itself a DAX rather than a DEX, probably for branding purposes. The term DAX is more or less an evolution from DEX (Decentralized EXchange) and it's certainly a clever one, but feels a bit gimmicky to be quite honest. Edit: After exploring the pulsara DAX in a bit more detail, I think I take back my previous statement. The integration of DAO elements into the front end of the exchange is very seamless and expressive. It feels much more integrated than a lot of other decentralized exchanges. Pretty much every DEX's native token confers voting rights in the direction of the protocol, but the way Pulsara makes it easy for any normal person to build out a proposal (and the snappy responsiveness of the front end) has me impressed.

   

2. The Coreum native token, while currently created through token emissions similar to many other cosmos based blockchains via inflation paid out to stakers who economically secure the blockchain in a process that is known as "byzantine fault tolerant", was initially generated via a TEG or Token Generation Event on the "XRPL" or Ripple ledger... I honestly don't know enough about Ripple's architecture to speak straight from the stream of consciousness, but basically it's like a blockchain but different. Search "Is Ripple a blockchain" and you'll certainly get some interesting answers.

3. Coreum has an average block time of about 1 second, which is pretty damn fast. It also has a relatively small validator set of 64, compared to lots of other cosmos chains that exceed 100. Over 60% of the Coreum tokens $CORE are "bonded" which means they are staked/delegated to "validators" who are responsible for validating transactions and maintaining the Coreum blockchain. There's almost 650 million $CORE tokens.

Okay I'm kind of going off the deep end in terms of details here. If you read all that, sorry if it was boring or made very little sense. I am very aware that most of the 3-5 readers of the flarnchain newsletters aren't trying to geek out on technical details and random facts about an obscure Layer 1 blockchain in an obscure corner of the crypto universe.

The key takeaway I'd like to leave you with, if you've made it this far, is that there's an awful lot of "future of finance" financial rails being built on Coreum, and the ecosystem is vibrant and active. Many Layer 1s last for a bit, wilt, and then become zombie chains. I think Coreum has a bit of polish you don't see with most cosmos chains, but that could be a direct consequence of the fact that it comes from XRP, which is the fourth largest crypto asset in all of crypto. Coreum is connected to a liquidity powerhouse, that is third only to Ethereum and Bitcoin. I don't count Tether because Tether is a token that lives on many blockchains, rather than Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP - these are known as layer 1 blockchains.

This week, in my "52 weeks of coreum" initiative, I bought 53 $CORE with one $OM that was sitting in my Osmosis wallet. I staked 50 of those CORE. In total:

• Total holdings: 64.02 CORE

• Total staked: 60 CORE

• Total invested: $8.07

• Value of invested amount: $7.04

• % Gain / Loss: -12.74%

Assessment? Far too early to tell if this is going to go well. Obviously I could compare the change in the assets sold to buy CORE to evaluate opportunity cost, so I'm tracking the data there, but that sounds like way too much work. Also, once I start collecting Staking rewards from my staked CORE, it gets a bit more interesting. I may even diversify inside the Coreum ecosystem over the course of these 52 weeks, perhaps using some of the staking rewards to buy coins like $SARA (the token of the DAX I discussed above).

Overall, I'm excited to get back into the analytics and evaluation of a little investment adventure. In the past, I eventually ended up with pretty interesting tracking devices, so I'm curious to see how this evolves over time.

That's the end of this week's flarnchain newsletter! Sorry for getting a bit technical, and sorry for no market animal artwork this week. If you opened this and saw a wall of text and zero pretty pictures (and felt bummed out about it), here's a pixel art sketch I drew a couple weeks ago, that will eventually become a Proto Tower on the Stargaze blockchain.

Okay that's all for tonite.

Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.

>< Cheers ><

~ Flarnrules

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This week I'm back with a short one. Bitcoin just dipped below $90k. That's not great if you bought Bitcoin above $90k. The price of a single Bitcoin is still quite a bit higher than it has been for the vast majority of its existence, but that still doesn't mean a whole lot for people who are actively investing in this market. Things are grim out there.

Why did the crypto markets tank this week? It's anyone's guess. My guess is it has something to do with the macro economic environment coupled with an uncertain political climate. Pretty vague, but that's how I like it. This newsletter's tagline is, after all, "an ocean of knowledge, one inch deep"

Maybe in future newsletters I'll muster up the charisma to go in depth about why I think crypto markets are shaky right now, and could be this way in the near future. But not tonight.

The total crypto market capitalization plummeted 4.4% today to just below $2.9 Trillion. A sizeable drop for a single day. Bitcoin ($BTC) is currently $85,674 and Ethereum ($ETH) is $2,337. Crowd favorite, Cosmos Hub ($ATOM) is at $4.63.

This week's market animal is a blackswanberus. I'm not going to draw one of these. I'll just post a link to the blackswanberus I drew many weeks ago:

Mint Market Animal 167 | Stargaze

This is the Market Animal from Flarnchain newsletter 167. It is a Blackswanberus because last week's market experienced a triple black swan event and this week is the launch of the Puppy Cerberus collection. Royalties and proceeds go to the Proto Towers collab wallet.

https://www.stargaze.zone

What does "black swan" even mean when referring to financial markets? It means that something unusual happened. Just like it's unusual for a swan to be black... most swans are white. To be honest, it's not unusual for the crypto markets to tank by 4% in a single day. It just seems to be really interesting to talk about right now. Let's look at the market cap of crypto during the previous bull run:

All that said... there's a chance that crypto markets are exceptionally bumpy this time around. I won't go into too many details, but the macro economic and geopolitical environments are not super stable, and they are getting less stable by the day. What to do in these circumstances? Well I can't speak for anyone but myself.. in my case, I'm in learning and discipline mode. What better to learn and exercise discipline than to try and recreate the lightning in a bottle that I had with "52 weeks of wads" an experiment where I bought Wadsquad NFTs every week for 52 weeks.

Wadsquad NFTs are a collection of silly looking ball / blob shaped objects with faces on them. They were super cheap so I bought at least 1 every week and kept track of all of my transactions. Here's how it played out:

Anyways, I'd really enjoyed doing that back in 2023. It gave me something specific to talk about each and every week, and so I'd like to do something similar. This time, for an entire Layer 1 blockchain called Coreum.

Coreum is a Layer 1 blockchain connected to the Cosmos Ecosystem via the Interblockchain Communication Protocol. It's an interesting ecosystem because it also connects a totally unrelated ecosystem called Ripple / XRP / XRPL through some bridging tech that I'm not familiar with and I don't really understand. XRP has a pretty intense cult following, and I'm kind of a Cosmos Network fanboy so it seems like an interesting combination of two worlds.

To start, I'm just going to buy some Coreum tokens, and stake them on the network. The Coreum staking rewards are absurdly high right now, north of 20%. That should be fun to monitor over the course of this 52 week period. As like last time, I will collect data about my activities, and gradually improve the quality of the data visualization for what I'm doing. This may or may not result in me making money. I'll be spending between $1 and $10 worth of other crypto each week. Basically I'll sell some of my other crypto to buy some Coreum. I will not sell any Coreum related to this initiative until the end of the 52 week period, and I likely will never sell any ever...

Here's some base information about Coreum from one of Coreum's block explorers:

Alright, this week, on week 1, I bought 5 OSMO worth of or about $1.58 worth of OSMO. This yielded 10.37 Coreum. I staked 10 Coreum. I'll put together a little data visualization of my actions after a few weeks have transpired. My hopes and dreams suggest that by the end of 52 weeks, I'll have spent between $50 and $100 worth of other crypto and my Coreum portfolio will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.... the reality is more likely that I will have spent between $50 and $100 worth of other crypto and my Coreum portfolio will be worth between $50 and $100. Expecting number to go up is a fool's errand at this point. I am not investing. I am simply developing a habit. If you think this is stupid, or asinine... I completely understand. I don't know why I do this to myself. But... I do it nonetheless.

Okay then... if you made it this far, thank you for reading the Flarnchain newsletter.

I used to say this at the end of my newsletters, I should probably get back into the habit of it - CRYPTO CAN BE VOLATILE. NEVER INVEST MORE THAN YOU ARE WILLING TO LOSE 100% OF YOUR INVESTMENT. I've made money in crypto... but I've also seen stuff that I've purchased drop by 99%. And then drop by 99% again. And then drop by 99% again. That's called "going to goblin town" and is a topic for a future newsletter.

Hope you have a fantastic rest of your week.

over and out ~

~ flarn

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Just because I took 35 weeks off from the Flarnchain Newsletter doesn't mean that I didn't think about it... a lot. I probably could have just used that time thinking to do some "doing" or in this case "writing" but I didn't. The past is past, the present is now, and the future can be exciting, or it can be dull. It can also be somewhere in-between.

This week's newsletter has no specific topic. No specific goal. And it's not going to be very long. First and foremost, let's cover the basics:

Bitcoin ($BTC): Bitcoin is currently hovering around $100k per Bitcoin. That's insane. The last newsletter I wrote, on June 12, 2024 Bitcoin was around $66k. Bitcoin Popped to $100k around the beginning of November 2024, and has stayed there ever since. If anyone believes that crypto is in a deep bear market... they probably don't have enough Bitcoin.

Ethereum ($ETH): Ethereum is currently around $2,700, and has been range bound between $4k and $2k for the past year. When I wrote the last Flarnchain Newsletter, $ETH was quite a bit higher than it is today, at $3,618. That's pretty wild. Bitcoin is up over 45% and Ethereum is down almost 25%.

The last newsletter I wrote was about the concept of "altcoin season". Altcoin season is a theoretical event that occurs after Bitcoin season. The theory goes that after a sustained Bitcoin bull market, folks who hold Bitcoins will take some profits with their Bitcoins into "altcoins" which means any crypto assets that aren't Bitcoin. First, into major altcoins like Ethereum, and then later into smaller altcoins and fresh new utility-based projects. There's some evidence of this theory during the last bull-market in 2020-2022. I'm not going to go into details, because I'm hoping to wrap this thing up very soon, but I think this would be a great topic to cover in the coming weeks.

Let's close this week's newsletter out with a high level status update. I've maintained a list of 12 years of Wednesdays since the inception of this newsletter. It is called the "Flarnmap" and it's simply a way of tracking where this newsletter is at in relation to the 12 year time horizon I set when I started writing this thing. I've greyed out all of the weeks where I missed a newsletter.

Chew on this for a moment, and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

As always, thanks for reading my newsletter if you made it this far. See you next week!

Cheers,

-Flarn

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Hi everyone, welcome back to the flarnchain newsletter. Brought to you each and every week, like an atomic clock. This week we are going to talk about "altseason" which is basically a term for when altcoins (crypto that is not Bitcoin) go wild.

Altcoin season is a period of time in crypto markets after the price of Bitcoin has gone way up. See the chart below. It's kind of hard to read because I took a screenshot, but basically, the big spiking line on the far right is Bitcoin. The dipping line on the right is Altcoin prices. When the Altcoin prices go below the bottom horizontal line... the chart suggests you should sell your house - to buy altcoins.

Then when altcoin prices go up above the redline at the top of the chart, the chart suggests you should sell you altcoins to buy a (presumably) better house.

Interesting theory.

Lets talk about the markets.

Bitcoin is around $67.5k after last week's strong showing above $70k. The rest of the market is also down compared to last week. I would rate this week's market a bear market, but that makes me bullish. So we saw a bear week... but we are still in what I would define as "bullish consolidation". If the 4 year crypto cycle plays out, we may see a consolidation phase all through the summer and then outrageous prices in the fall and into the winter.

This week's market animal is a baby bear because like... a short blip in the radar of an otherwise lengthy consolidation phase around $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion market capitalization. I'm predicting that this will continue, and then when things go crazy the market will spike as high as a $10 trillion market cap. That's if the bullish scenario plays out. If the non-bullish scenario plays out, I think the market won't go below $1.5 trillion valuation.

Evidence? My feelings.

Don't buy crypto based on other people's feelings. Remember. Crypto is incredibly risky and volatile. Never invest more than you are willing to lose 100% of what you put in.

That's all for tonight. I keep saying I'm going to do a lengthy newsletter or talk about something technical, but instead I just keep getting distracted with mini projects. For example, check out this amazing animation created for the Proto Towers collection:

This gif is over 600 frames long. It last many seconds. It took the artist thousands of minutes to create. I'm completely baffled that someone wanted to create a piece of art to be included in the Proto Towers collection that took this long to create. Thank you Crypto Matcha for your contribution to the Proto Towers collection.

Alright that's it for tonight! Hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week.

Cheers!

-Flarn

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Welcome to the flarnchain newsletter! I am up way too late so I'm really just going to write a couple sentences. Bitcoin is currently at $71k, which is super high, right around the highest it has ever been. Jim Cramer had the Chairman of the SEC Gary Gensler on tv recently and talked about some of the cryptocurrencies that I know about - namely osmosis and bonk (lol). The market is up, and thus this week's market animal is a bull market. I don't have anything new, only an old drawing of a bull:

Alright that's it for tonight. time to sleep

hope you have a good rest of your week

-flarn

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This is another one of those nights where I would like to sit here and write about something interesting in the realm of crypto, but instead I'm just going to ramble for a bit and cut it short. I apologize to my readers. I owe you more. Next week will be better.

Hi everybody! Welcome to the Flarnchain Newsletter, brought to you each and every week, like an atomic clock. This week I would like to ramble on and on about memecoin mania hittin' the crypto streets, but I just don't have enough time to do that right now. I will say this. I saw something where Dua Lupa, Solja Boy, and Caitlyn Jenner (among many other celebrities) created memecoins for their devoted followers and crypto degens. I also saw that some of these celebrity memecoins were actually rugpulls and scams. I don't really know what to believe or care all that much to be honest, but it's definitely the big story in crypto right now.

The vast majority of these coins were created on the Solana blockchain, which is a super fast, super monolithic blockchain. It's one of the chains that had a lot of traction with Sam Bankman Fried when he was doing his thing (before he went to jail for that), and it has some interesting design choices regarding protocol design. It's fast, cheap to use, and has a very confusing data scheme under the hood. It also uses something called proof of history, which apparently (im not even sure anymore) allows it do have super crazy fast block times. It also shuts down a lot, but people don't really care because it's fast and cheap, and that's really important for people trading pictures of celebrities with cryptocurrencies attached to them,

Anyways, celebrity memecoins are in. Read tiny bit about it here: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/cailtlyn-jenner-token-scammer-sahil-arora-celebrity-network-leaked-price-list/

Alright I really don't have much time to dive into the overall crypto meta, so I'm just gonna say this. Bitcoin has been flat since last week (about $68k now). Ethereum had an ETF and went up a bit (almost $4k now). The total crypto market is around $2.65 trillion, which is really close to the previous bullmarket all time high. I didn't even look at coingecko.com as I wrote that, so you know... do your own research ya lazy animal.

Because in my opinion, crypto is flat this week (without glancing at a chart, just reading my twitter timeline), this week's market animal is a crab. I'm not gonna draw a crab, I'm just gonna grab a drawing that I made a long time ago:

Alright! That's it for tonight. Hope you had a good one this week, and hope you continue to have a good one for the rest of this week.

Peace out!

Flarn

Welcome to the Flarnchain newsletter, brought to your inbox each and every week like an atomic clock. This week is not really going to be much of a newsletter, but rather, similar to last week, a checking of the box. I have been publishing this newsletter each and every week for 172 weeks in a row, and I have not taken a single week off. HOWEVER, sometimes, like tonight (and seemingly more frequently), I'm getting started on this thing later and later.

I apologize for that, but it just happens to be a situation where there's not enough hours in the day. I need to get back into the habit of writing some paragraphs on a topic in crypto during the week, so I can just copy and paste them right in here.

Regardless of the above, let's cover a couple things that happened this week:

1. There was a big vote on a crypto bill in US politics. The bill, called FIT21, included a more substantial regulatory framework for crypto than has existed in the past. It passed int he Senate with a narrow margin, which markets responded positively to, albeit... the response was somewhat lukewarm.

2. Bitcoin pushed above $70k for the second time this cycle, and the second time ever earlier this week. Currently the price of Bitcoin is hovering around $69k. nice

3. There was some cosmos drama this week - this time relating to some of the more modern "modular" blockchains that are part of the cosmos network. There's three in this category: Celestia ($TIA), Saga ($SAGA) and Dymension ($DYM). All three do somewhat different things, but have very similar token distribution models and have had similar price action (down only). It's a bit complex to explain, but the major reason for the drama has been the way insider's locked tokens were still able to earn staking rewards, and that the staking rewards were not locked. So these chains are essentially just a few insiders dumping their tokens on retail holders. As more and more retail holders become hip to this reality, they sell, continuing the downward spiral in price.

I don't really have much more energy to write anything, so I'm going to just post a picture of the Bitcoin chart and then use Midjourney to AI generate a market animal this week.

Okay and this week's market animal is definitely a bull. Since I still haven't launched the Puppy Cerberus collection, we are still doing three headed animals. Probably for the next couple of months we will be seeing more three headed animals. For this one, since last week was a bullberus as well, this one will be a bullberus breathing fire. Please, midjourney, dont let me down

10 minutes later....

Okay so Midjourney cannot generate a three headed bull. Looks like I'll just need to plagiarize my own work:

The above image will not be minted as a market animal nft. We will just skip this week.

That's it for tonight. I need to get some sleep now.

Hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week.

Cheers!

-Flarn

🤘🤘

Happy wednesday everyone! Welcome to the 171st edition of the flarnchain newsletter, brought to your inbox each and every week, like an atomic clock.

Rain or shine. Sleep or no sleep. This newsletter will keep coming. But tonight, or this morning depending on who you are, I must say that I'm in need of some rest. I had enough time to take a look at the Bitcoin chart to see like... what's going on in the real crypto markets... and it appears that Bitcoin is very up as of the past few hours.

That means this week's market animal is a bullberus! Still three headed things, since my collection of three headed puppies (Puppy Cerberus) continues to be delayed as I procrastinate by going a wholly different direction this month. See link.

So I've been trying to figure out how to query the Osmosis blockchain for the past 1.5 hours to see who all is holding tokens related to the above link. I can't figure it out. Someone. Anyone. If you have blockchain engineering knowledge - please let me know how to query token factory holders on the Osmosis blockchain.

Thanks for reading tonight. I might actually write something more meaningful next week.

Hope you have a good rest of your week.

-Flarn

🤘🤘

Welcome back to the flarnchain newsletter! This week I did a lot of crazy stuff, so I'm just going to write a couple sentences. First, the crypto markets were... I guess up this week - Bitcoin was up 7% since last time I checked, but that was a few hours ago. The 1 week chart looks like this:

See, even though markets were green, it doesn't feel earned. We have been chopping sideways for several weeks when you zoom out a bit. Are we truly in a bullberus or bearberus market when things just keep bouncing up and down, skittering about around a range of $55k-$65k? In my opinion... nope.

So this week's market animal is a crabberus. And the crabberus that I drew and minted as an nft tonight took longer than it took me to write the content of this newsletter.

Status update - I'm still working on the Puppy Cerberus nft collection. Check this out if you want some samples: Puppy Cerberus Archive

Also status update - the long awaited start.cooking memecoin generator platform launched on the Cosmos Network's liquidity hub, Osmosis. If you don't know what a memecoin generator is... well... its basically a platform that makes it trivially easy to deploy a cryptocurrency. Due to the ease of deployment, the number of configuration options are limited, but that stuff doesn't really matter if the goal is just... meme-ing for the culture.

Because my primary goal at the outset of starting this newsletter was to just sort of - explore crypto and have fun doing random stuff (while also trying to obtain immense quantities of wealth unattainable doing normal stuff) I decided to have a go at this whole memecoin thing, and generated one that resonates in a way that is hard to describe. Best experienced organically. You can check it out here: start.cooking - it's the one where the logo is a fly on a pile of crap - that fly also happens to be one of the nfts in the "frogs" collection that minted out a couple of months ago.

Alright that's it. That's all for me tonight.

Goodnight and best wishes.

Cheers!

-flarn

🤘🤘

Welcome back to the flarnchain newsletter!

This week was pretty bad for crypto. Not gonna lie. But then I saw this:

The above chart is from 2 bull markets ago. Not sure why the person who posted it didn't post one of these from the past bull market, but at quick glance, the same sort of situation played out last time too.

Looking at this chart, it doesn't look like the exact same sort of situation is playing out this time around, but then again... things didn't really start to kick off until after "Defi Summer" which was basically the first time Automated Market Makers were a thing, and Uniswap, the largest of these, airdropped UNI tokens to people that ended up being in the 10s of thousands of dollars.

Just out of curiosity, let's see how this exact same scale (1 week candles) looks right now:

But that doesn't tell the whole story. Let's zoom wayyyyy out to see what that looks like:

Pack it in everyone. Time to go home. Crypto was a good attempt at a new thing, but looks like Bitcoin and it's ilk are dead. ☠☠☠. It was fun while it lasted.

Because of the fact that Bitcoin is down like... 10% in the past week, it's pretty obvious this week's market animal is a BEAR. But since I'm still working on Puppy Cerberus, this week's market animal is actually a Bearberus, which is a three headed bear (🐻🐻🐻). Also, since I'm seeing a lot of AI generated images freaking killing it on Stargaze, my favorite crypto platform, I'm going to save a ton of time and just use AI to generate a bearberus based on some of my other drawings. Sometimes you gotta cut corners and go to bed early:

Alright, that's all for tonight. I'm coming to terms with the fact that these newsletters haven't been all that interesting lately. I'm okay with that. As long as I'm delivering them each and every week, like an atomic clock that's what matters... right?

Hope you enjoy the rest of your week.

Cheers!

-flarn

🤘🤘

Welcome to the Flarnchain Newsletter, brought to your inbox each and every week like an atomic clock. As we near the end of April and a week has transpired since the last newsletter (newsletter #167), I'm coming to terms with the fact that only about one to two hours of effort each night is sustainable. This weekend I made a huge push on Friday and Saturday night to complete a project I've been working on, and that effort took it's toll later - I had zero motivation to work on my project on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday of this week.

Thankfully, Tuesday night, which is when I prepare the multi-message transaction that distributes the royalties wallets to all of the artist collaborators on Proto Towers, was relatively straightforward due to the fact that I built this:

Before I built the above utility, it took me about 1 hour to prepare the transaction and then execute it on the Stargaze blockchain. Now that I have this thing working, it takes about 1 minute. That's really cool. I've been working on that utility for about 3-4 weeks, about 30 minutes per night. It's now finished, so now on Tuesday nights I have more time to work on other stuff. The problem is when I overwork myself on a weekend night, such as last Friday night, and end up super exhausted and unmotivated after a full day of toiling in the fiat mines. I need to be aware of this and pace myself accordingly. It is after all, a marathon, not a sprint.

Anyways, enough of that, let's talk about the markets.

This week seems to have been mostly up, especially compared to the "black swanberus" that was last week, this week feels a lot more bullish, but not full on bull vibes. I feel like this week resembled what often times I would call a bunny market (sort of skittish, fast moving, bouncing around a bit), but it also feels like it's gearing back up into bull market territory.

Let's take a quick look at the 7 day chart for Bitcoin to catch our immediate bearings:

Let's also zoom out a bit to see what the 90 day chart looks like:

It appears that Bitcoin has found a strong floor at $60k. When an asset price continues to bounce off a floor, that floor is known as "support" ~ as in "Bitcoin continues to find support in the $60k range" or some other such nonsense.

The overall crypto market is sitting at around $2.4 trillion market cap, which is actually quite low compared to previous weeks. I actually think this looks like a good entry point for people on the sidelines, as market caps are low and we are now a few days post halving. The supply shock caused by reducing the supply of new Bitcoins by 1/2 may take a few weeks to accumulate to the point that we get insane price action. Time will tell.

This week's market animal is going to be another three-headed animal, because I'm still working on the puppy cerberus colllection. I was hoping to be finished by now, but That's just the way things work... things always take longer than I expect. Always.

Because Bitcoin is up 4.5%, that feels bullish, so let's try to draw a bullberus (🐂🐂🐂), which is a three-headed bull.

Okay that drawing actually took me a lot longer than expected, so let's end the newsletter here.

Hope you have a nice rest of your week!

Cheers,

-Flarn

🤘🤘

Welcome to the Flarnchain newsletter, brought to your inbox (or sometimes spam box) each and every Wednesday night, like an atomic clock.

This week is going to be a special edition. I will likely dedicate a large portion of this newsletter to explaining the Puppy Cerberus nft collection, a collection of drawings that I will be launching before I publish Flarnchain Newsletter #168.

It's a long time coming, I've been working on this collection for several months. Because I have been a busy bee working in the fiat mines and also sleeping a bit more than in March, progress on this collection has been slow, working on it in bits and pieces on nights where I'm not too exhausted and carving out weekend chunks of time here and there... but ultimately it's time to launch the collection.

Why? Because I've pushed back the launch date a few times already due to time constraints, and at this point... it's time to just, give it a go, otherwise I'll just procrastinate forever. Plus, the timing is great, since the launch can coincides with:

the Bitcoin halving event

April 20th (4/20) which is a date that resonates with the crypto community due to it's meme-ability and association with the consumption of cannabis.

Anyways, before we get into that too much, let's address the elephant in the room.....

Holy crap. Last week was not good for the crypto markets. While last week's market animal was an adorable unicorn, this week's market animal should be something like... a disgusting Cronenbergian hybrid creature... Bitcoin dropped from $70k all the way down to somethin like... $58k, and has now apparently leveled off around $62k. As a result of liquidation cascades that rippled through the entire crypto markets, total crypto market capitalization shed something close to $400 billion in value in just a few short days. That's pretty significant. Current crypto market cap is around $2.37 trillion, which I was getting used to writing things like $2.75 and "Almost $3 trillion", well... $2.37 trillion is most definitely not almost $3 trillion. It's a decrease of, and this is a scientific term, a lot.

Who cares though? The Bitcoin halving is coming in 3 days. Let's hold on to our butts and get ready for a wild ride. The four year cycle is about to start anew, and we get a first row seat at the action. Readers of this newsletter will get to, quite literally, spectate on one of the greatest financial games to exist in history: the crypto bullrun.

Or not, markets could collapse and the cycle could potentially not play out. There could be too strong of macroeconomic headwinds for the power of the Bitcoin halving event to overcome. World War 3 could break out, and wars don't usually (in the short run) do great for risk-on financial assets. Let alone the multitude of other risk factors associated with counting on or expecting magic internet money to for some reason increase in price when the vast majority of people either have strong disdain for the entire industry, or perhaps know it through the various headlines caused by Sam Bankman Fried's escapades.

Either way, I'm going to continue to create art and publish it on blockchains, because actually enjoy it, and I think some other people like my art too! So anyways, this week's market animal was going to be a Puppy Cerberus, but instead I've made it a blackswanberus, because last week was a triple blacks swan event.

Okay, that's it for market animal. A quick bit of alpha for those reading this, if you hold one of these in your wallet, you might get something special. All mint proceeds flow to the Proto Towers royalties wallet.

This is a collection of 3333 puppy Cerberuses. I'm shooting to launch it on April 20. I'm trying a lot of different things with this collection that incorporate all of the things I've learned from past collections. I don't know if they will result in a successful performance of the collection.

There's still a lot of work to be done on the collection, but a few things I have figured out:

1. the collection will be multiple mini collections

2. there's going to be at least 2 whitelists

3. whitelist 1 can mint for 3 stars

4. whitelist 2 can mint for 33 stars

5. the public mint price will be 333 stars

6. There will be 3000 static nfts, 300 animated nfts, and 33 xnfts

7. of the 3000 static nfts, I'm going to break that collection up into a bunch of sub collections to test out different art generation techniques and rarity configurations.

Okay that's about all I wanted to say there. The hardest part is going to be the 300 animated nfts. I don't know if I currently have enough content to convincingly generate 300 animated nfts... I may need to do some tricks with some post processing layers to expand that collection size to make the pieces distinct enough.

There's also going to be a few surprises in the collection that I'm excited for people to find.

Lots more work to finish the collection by 4/20... I'm not 100% certain I can hit that deadline, but I'll try my best.

Okay, that's it for tonight.

-Flarn

🤘

Welcome back to the Flarnchain newsletter! I'm getting started VERY late tonight, so let's jump right into it. Today, Uniswap Labs (https://app.uniswap.org/swap) was just served a Wells Notice, from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), presumably in advance of some sort of formal lawsuit. According to Cornell Law School, a "Wells Notice" is:

a letter sent by a securities regulator to a prospective respondent, notifying him of the substance of charges that the regulator intends to bring against the respondent, and affording the respondent with the opportunity to submit a written statement to the ultimate decision maker.

It's basically a letter that's saying "Hi! We are going to bring charges against you, better get ready to feel our wrath" or something like that. It's also a huge bummer, after the SEC has been overzealously pursuing Coinbase in another lawsuit regarding it's Staking Program. It seems that the SEC is swinging for the fences and trying to take down the two biggest US crypto institutions:

1. Coinbase (which is the onramp into crypto for most people who use crypto in the US)

2. Uniswap (which is the largest decentralized trading platform on earth, and is operated out of NYC)

I don't have a ton of time to get into the details, or really rant about either of the cases at length, but let me just tell you my opinion. I think they are both stupid lawsuits and not in keeping with the primary objectives of the SEC which are to:

1. Inform and protect investors <- not apparently important

2. Facilitate capital formation <- clearly not important

3. Enforce Federal securities laws <- we are here

4. Regulate securities markets <- doesn't really happen

5. Provide data <- not in any way that's meaningful for retail investors

The SEC primarily seems to exist to protect the vested interests in finance to ensure that retail investors can get dumped on by Jim Cramer stock picks each and every week, like an atomic clock.

Alright. Enough opinion for one night. Let's talk about some facts.

This week the crypto markets are like.. kind of sideways, but kind of up. There's been a bit of a rally these past couple of days, but overall markets have seemed kind of choppy for the past week. Bitcoin is hovering around $70k, which is now not a new number (crazy), and Ethereum is hovering right around $3,500. ATOM continues to languish in the ~$11.00 range, which continues to disappoint me every week I write this newsletter.

The total crypto market cap is right around $2.75 trillion. I think things will get very interesting if the market cracks through $3 trillion. We are about 9 days away from the next Bitcoin Halving.

Here's the 1 month bitcoin chart:

When we zoom out to the 3 month chart, we can see that this looks a lot like what might be described as a "consolidation phase" where markets kind of take a breather to go sideways before fresh capital is ready to be deployed... hinging of course on upcoming macroeconomic and other cyclical factors (the 4 year cycle is real people).

Okay there's your market update. Bitcoin is a proxy for the entire crypto market.

Next up ~

This weeks market animal is aaaaaaaaa Unicorn (). Why? Because Uniswap's logo is a unicorn, so it felt like I should make the market animal a Unicorn in solidarity with them.

Anyways, what even is Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange, and it has done over a trillion dollars in volume traded since it's inception in 2018. It uses a technology known as an Automated Market Maker (AMM), which allows anyone to swap assets permissionlessly ~ permissionless means that it's free to use without any trusted 3rd party intermediary, this means that the application is "trustless", because instead of trusting someone to do the right thing, you use it as an open-source exposed program - both at your leisure, and at your own risk. Like going to a playground and swinging on the swing set, but instead for finance.

So... I did my best to draw a unicorn, which as been minted as Market Animal #166 on the Stargaze blockchain.

Alright, that's a wrap.

If you read this, hope you enjoyed it!

Have a wonderful rest of your week,

Cheers!

-Flarn

Happy Wednesday everyone, and welcome back to another Flarnchain newsletter, brought to your inbox each and every week, like an atomic clock.

This week I'm getting back into the swing of things, and there's just an awful lot going on:

1. Bitcoin halving is in around 20 days.

2. Sam Bankman Fried (remember that guy?) recently was sentenced to a bunch of years in prison.

3. Do Kwon(remember that guy?) developments have recently heated up.

4. Craig Wright was confirmed by a UK court to NOT BE Satoshi Nakamoto.

5. Osmosis, my favorite decentralized exchange, is doing something crazy with an application called Stream Swap and an NFT collection called Mad Scientists. More on that next week.

6. Aaaand I dunno, probably 10 other things.

As to not be overwhelmed by too much stuff, I'm going to try and keep this week focused. Let's get started.

Crypto Markets have been jumpy / down the past couple of weeks. The overall crypto market cap is sitting around $2.5 trillion, so down over a hundred billion compared to last week, meme coins on Solana have been crazy, and Bitcoin is being tested at $65k and showing support, for now, at that price point. Here's the 3 month Bitcoin Chart as a quick reference, then time to move on!

If anyone is saying that the crypto markets aren't doing too well... I think it would probably make sense for them to zoom out a bit. As we can see from the 3 month chart, Bitcoin has been consolidating and range bound for the past few weeks, but overall the crypto market has seen a massive run up. For people who were investing deep into the previous bear market... they might be taking some profits right now. Also the macro narrative is about to start changing rapidly as we gear up into the 2024 election cycle. I don't want to make any predictions, but I think this summer has a really high chance of being completely insane.

This week's market animal is a BUNNY (). We haven't seen a bunny market in quite some time, because they really only emerge deeper into bull markets when things start to consolidate. I could have called this week a crab market, but with Easter being just this weekend, a bunny seemed appropriate. I very much enjoy drawing these little critters, hope you enjoy it too!

I just realized I put a typo in the collection description... but not in the actual nft description. You know what I am really hoping will be possible in the future? To be able to make some sort of meta collection, where you can tie a bunch of open editions and other collections into a single collection of collections. That should be possible with CosmWasm (cosmos webassembly) smart contracts.... but probably kind of confusing to implement.

Speaking of implementation, here's a reminder that we are only currently in year 1 of the implementation phase of the Flarnchain ecosystem. The things I'm doing this year are experiments and building blocks that create the foundation for future initiatives. I find that I learn better by doing, so each time I interact directly by putting stuff out there on blockchains, I'm learning and developing skills that are important for future stages.

Proto Towers has several collaborators lined up right now, which is super exciting. The current collaboration, by someone named Brady from a cool crypto project called Signal, created this eerie "Meatwood Tower" which I love. It's still currently on auction:

https://www.stargaze.zone

Meatwood Tower | Proto Towers | Stargaze

Where meat and wood would meet. A tower created in Aseprite by Brady from Signal.

You can click the link above to check it out on Stargaze.

Huahua has been down a lot recently, and is at it's lowest since I started this experiment. I haven't been tracking my purchases of Huahua very much lately, so I'll have to get back on that wagon next week. This week I purchased 1 ATOM worth of HUAHUA, which was about 71.5k HUAHUA. Back a few weeks ago 1 ATOM = 45k HUAHUA, so I'm basically just dollar cost averaging down. I think HUAHUA will have a major test in the next few months... if memecoin season comes to the cosmos, and people start messing around with some of the stuff available to create your own meme coins on Huahua, then I think that could have a major impact in price action.

That's about it. I wanted to spend some time talking about Wormhole, Osmosis + Stream Swap + Mad Scientists, and several other things I have my eye on, but I really can't spend much more time writing because it's time for me to go to sleep.

If you read this far, thank you! Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.

-Flarn

Hey everybody! I'm on vacation this week, so this one is gonna be super short.

First of all, welcome (back) to the Flarnchain Newsletter, brought to your inbox, each and every week like an atomic clock. I think that sometimes it might be going to your spam inbox, so check your spam if you aren't receiving this. Obviously this message won't get to the people it needs to... so this is probably a waste of time.

Anyways, the crypto market appears to be up this week! Bitcoin was $70k last time I checked, which was a few hours ago, and the market capitalization of all of crypto was like... close to $3 trillion last time I checked, which was probably a week ago.

Next, market animal. This week's market animal is a cow. If cows are rectangles, then bulls are squares. Chew on that for a moment:

What else am I supposed to talk about... oh right. 52 weeks of huahua. Well, I purchased some huahua last week, but I think it was only about $1 worth which is about 5,000 Huahua last time I checked...which might have been exactly a week ago.

Alright that's it for tonight!

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

-Flarn

Welcome to the flarnchain newsletter, brought to you each and every week like an atomic clock. This week, the crypto markets dropped for the first time in several weeks. For about 4-5 weeks, markets have been a resounding up only, and this week, markets took a breather. However, just today there appears to have been a market rally, and now things are back on track as we head into the 4th Bitcoin halving, which is set to occur on April 20th, 2024.

Bitcoin ($BTC) sits at around $67k, Ethereum ($ETH) at around $3.5k and Flarnchain newsletter favorite Cosmos Hub ($ATOM) is currently lagging behind at a measly $11.72.

At the start of this newsletter, I mentioned that markets took a breather. Let's take a closer look. Here's the Bitcoin chart for the past 7 days:

Looks not too terrible, but that's because after getting close to $60k, Bitcoin bounced back up to $67.5k pretty quickly today. Now, let's zoom out a bit and look at the three month chart:

The thing about last weeks dip, is that it didn't even touch the highest highs from February. We are in a new paradigm for Bitcoin leading into a halving. Let's zoom out even mooooore.

The big double peak in the center of the screen from late 2020 to mid 2022 is the previous bull market. Bitcoin's price had not reached the previous bull market's peak prior to it's third halving, which occurred sometime in the spring of 2020.

When we look at this time around, Bitcoin has already reached an all-time-high, and the halving hasn't even occurred. The theory around Bitcoin halvings is that with a 50% reduction in new supply and no other factors changing, the simple law of supply and demand should dictate that Bitcoin price should rise. It would appear that Bitcoin's price is already rising substantially, thus perhaps this time around we are in a new paradigm... That doesn't change the fact that the halving is going to happen and that new supply will be cut in half. My prediction is that Bitcoin's price is going to increase dramatically.

It would appear that Bitcoin interest is just beginning to spike, but has not reached the highs from the previous cycle. It's interesting that "bitcoin' interest actually spiked in around September 2017, the previous-previous bull market. My theory for why that was the peak is that "crypto" interest began eating away at Bitcoin's overall share of attention, so I did a quick comparison:

We can see that crypto was not really trending at all until a minor blip in September 2017, and then a much larger spike during the previous bull market. Interest in crypto is also spiking right now, but has not yet reached levels seen in the past bull market.

What does this all mean? My thesis (which is really a thesis borrowed from lots of other people who follow these markets... I'm just agreeing with them) is that we haven't really seen anything yet. I think this year is going to be an absolutely insanely strong market for all risk-on assets, and I think crypto assets will outperform everything.

Market animal

this week's market animal was a Cerberus (🐶🐶🐶). Cerberus is a three headed dog that protects the gates of hell, according to Greek mythology. Even though the markets are down a bit this week, it doesn't really make sense to call this market a bear market. I don't think this market is a bear market.

I'm really just using this as an opportunity to promote the art collection I've been working on recently, puppy cerberus. It's going to be launched around April 20, 2024. I've been drawing various versions of this design every night for over a month, and by the time April 20th rolls around, I'll have enough traits and animations to complete a full collection. The collection will consist of 3,000 static drawings, 333 animations, and 33 xNFTs, which are interactive.

52 Weeks of Huahua

I've sort of been slacking on 52 weeks of Huahua. I've been following the rules of the experiment, but not a whole lot has been happening beyond that. I was hoping to use this as an opportunity to improve my ability to write on-chain queries, and query the wallet that has been accumulating Huahua, but I'm still tracking this the old fashioned way with a spreadsheet. Last week I purchased around 6,000 Huahua, which was worth about $1.30 -> you can analyze the wallet here if you want:

https://www.mintscan.io/chihuahua/address/chihuahua1mhdddwykuamekp43a20u3skwjct5622vrvysud

Alright, that's it for tonight.

To everyone who keeps reading this... thank you!

hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.

Cheers,

-Flarn

🤘🤘

Welcome back to the Flarnchain Newsletter! I'm getting started on this one pretty late tonight, thanks to the "Love is Blind" season finale (lol not joking). That's not going to stop me from delivering this newsletter to your inbox each and every week like an atomic clock though.

This marks week 162 in a row of writing the Flarnchain newsletter. Lots of ups and downs over the past 3+ years, but this past week marked a pretty big up for crypto markets overall. Bitcoin reached an all-time-high and is currently sitting around $73,000 - which is around $3k-$4k higher than it's previous all-time-high reached way back in October 2021.

As you can see from the long term chart, this particular surge in price in 2023 and 2024 has been nothing less than parabolic. Bitcoin has been the best performing asset in the past decade... by a longshot. I don't anticipate that changing in the next decade.

What else... Ethereum upgraded this week. The most recent upgrade called "Dencun" now allows layer 2 scaling solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, Zk Sync and a multitude of other layer 2s to bundle transactions in a more efficient manner, dramatically reducing the transaction fees on these networks.

I personally have shied away from using Ethereum and it's rollups this cycle. I really never got the hang of the user interface of Ethereum, it always seemed like you had to do way too many transactions and pay way too many fees to get anything done. That doesn't mean it's not a super high quality investment... I just don't know if the whole "world computer" vision of Ethereum is going to play out if the network is cumbersome and confusing to use. That said, Ethereum has performed remarkably well in the past 1 year:

The total market capitalization of all crypto assets is hovering very close to $2.9 trillion, which is quite exciting. I feel like $3 trillion is a psychological barrier for the entire market, as $3 trillion feels like a big amount... of course $2 trillion is big, but $3 trillion is bigger (by $1 trillion).

About $200 billion of value was added to the entire crypto market, which is a lot for a single week. My prediction is that this bull market the crypto market capitalization will peak above $10 trillion. Much of that value will come from Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the big gains will come in the much smaller market cap crypto assets, especially the ones that have these things:

1. Good tech

2. Sufficient decentralization

3. Strong community

4. Great developer tools

I think these 4 categories are strongly represented by many of the blockchains in the Cosmos Network (the internet of blockchains), and so I'm putting a lot of my crypto efforts in those blockchains. In particular, a passion project of mine in terms of investment and actual use of the chain itself, is the Stargaze blockchain. It is an application specific blockchain designed as an NFT hub. Basically it's an online, decentralized, art gallery. I'm very bullish on Stargaze ($STARS).

I don't really have much more energy to say much more, but I do know I need to draw a market animal, so let's do that:

This week's market animal is obviously a bull. This bull is in the theme of Vladimir Harkonnen... okay last thing.

52 weeks of huahua

I purchased around 80k of huahua last week (about $20). The wallet now holds 1.2 million Huahua and the unrealized gain is 40.48%.

That's it for tonight!

Perhaps next week will be a bit more organized / substantial.

Cheers!

-flarn

This week I'm starting this newsletter very late. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, investigating a very strange NFT project on Stargaze and now I'm trying to figure out how to build my own IBC wallet tracking software so I can figure out how to trace funds across the interchain.

This is both the most awesome, and most terrible, part of blockchains. I find myself getting completely distracted by something that has quite literally nothing to do with what I'm trying to accomplish, yet I'm doing it anyways.

Here's the story. There's this NFT collection that recently launched on Stargaze called y00 punks. It's a derivative collection based on a different NFT collection called y00ts.

Derivatives can have eye catching visuals, because they have source material / inspiration from a project that had previous success. The y00t collection has some really stunning artwork for an NFT collection it's quite vibrant, detailed and creative. Anyways, this y00 punks derivative collection launches out of nowhere on Stargaze with a very high mint price and then out of the blue cuts the mint price to zero with a super strange tweet.

This is honestly the weirdest messaging I've seen from an NFT collection, and I've seen a lot of NFT collections in the past 3 years. Anyways, I caught wind of this collection and took a look a the art. It seems very nice and well thought out:

Now, by the point I'm learning about this collection, all hell has broken loose in their community. The people that minted from the collection for 400 stars (about $20) at the time, are all extremely angry, because well... they paid $20 to mint multiple NFTs that now can be minted for free. They start demanding refunds. The "community manager" starts hurling insults at community members and kicking people out of their discord server. I don't know. Lots of drama.

Anyways, the collection appears to be a 100% certified grade-A rug pull. So that's interesting to me, because it seems that the creators haven't closed up shop yet, and are trying to squeeze a few final bits of money out of the community by announcing that they will be airdropping new collections and that they are building some sort of token economy on top of the collection. So anyways, I spent some time in the Discord, confirmed my suspicions, and now here I am writing about it when I should be sleeping. This was a big waste of time.

You know how I know we are in a bull market? NFT rug pulls are back in style. This time with a slightly different flavor, but if you've been reading my newsletter you will know that I've written about rug pulls multiple other times in the past. All of the rug pulls that I was unfortunate enough to participate in (not as a rug pull-er, but as a rug pull-ee), were on the Solana blockchain ecosystem. Solana is still probably crawling with rug pulls, but now it seems that Stargaze has made it to the big leagues with a Solana Style rug pull. That's bullish for Stargaze in my opinion.

I'm supposed to talk about crypto markets

Markets are UP BABY, in a very big way. Bitcoin, for a very short moment, touched it's all time high of around $69,000. It promptly dropped down to around $60k (last week's peak), before bouncing up to $66k where it's comfortably sitting right now.

So Bitcoin is soaring, what is happening in the rest of crypto? Everything seems to be up. The entire crypto market capitalization has increased from $2.3 trillion to $2.6 trillion in a single week. That's $300 billion dollars of value added to the crypto markets in only 7 days. That's pretty amazing. For reference, last bull market peaked at around $3.5 trillion of value.

In the coming weeks, as we approach the Bitcoin halving event, I anticipate lots more volatility, and then a crazy summer of wild swings up and down, but with higher highs and higher lows. I think that this market will reach $10 trillion by the end of this year (unless of course we have some sort of black swan event).

Market Animal

This week's market animal is obviously a bull. It's been a bull now for two weeks in a row (). That would actually be six weeks in a row, but three weeks ago was a frog market, to commemorate the NFT collection I deployed called "frogs". To all of you frog holders out there, let me say this up front - frogs is not, and never will be, a rug pull. I am emotionally attached to those things. I put a lot of work into making those drawings, and I think they are cool.

So here's the part where I talk about how I spent way too much time drawing the market animal to talk about anything else this week, but really, truly honestly... I just got started way too late and spent far too much time messing around in the y00 punks discord. I will forever now blame all of my problems on y00 punks.

52 weeks of huahua

This is week 15 of the experiment. I have purchased 1.2 million HUAHUA over the past 15 weeks with various staking rewards and other crypto income. This 1.2 million HUAHUA was purchased for a total cost of $286 and is currently worth $385 for a current unrealized gain of 35.14%. Not bad for a bunch of Chihuahuas. If Huahua does what I hope it will do... I think we can turn that 35% into 3,500%. Jk jk. Here's the chart of the past 3 months of price performance for Huahua:

What's interesting to me about this chart is that if we zoom in, it looks like Huahua has peaked:

But really... that's just a tiny blip on the radar of the very long term price chart of huahua:

So basically... there's a lot more room to go up for Huahua - if it catches hold of a mainstream crypto narrative that is.

That's it for tonight (this morning). If you read this far, hope you enjoyed it! I certainly appreciate having you readers here. If you read this far, let me know your thoughts in the comments. Best comment will get a frog day nft minted to their stargaze wallet (stargaze wallet required).

Have a wonderful rest of your week!

Cheers!

-Flarn

Welcome to the Flarnchain newsletter, brought to your inbox each and every week like an atomic clock. This week marks the 160th week in a row of writing this newsletter, and I'm getting started pretty late so let's jump right into it.

News this week is all about Bitcoin. Bitcoin jumped from $50k to $60k this week, and peaked around $62k earlier today. For reference Bitcoin's all time high was $69k, and just 3 weeks ago I made a pretty big deal about the price of Bitcoin hitting $50k. Seems like there's been accelerant thrown on the fire that is a growing crypto bull market. The total market capitalization of all crypto right now stands a about $2.4 trillion, which is a lot higher than last week, thanks to Bitcoin's huge surge.

As such, this week's market animal is obviously a bull ().

No, the above drawing is not ai generated, I just drew that on a 64x64 pixel canvas. I think I'm stuck drawing things that look like frogs for a while, because I've been drawing lots of frogs the past few weeks. This bull kind of looks like a mixture between a pig and a frog. There's a saying in investing: bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered. Hopefully this piggish looking drawing isn't a bad omen.

Speaking of frogs...

frogs

frogs is an nft collection of frogs that minted out on the stargaze blockchain last week. The entire collection minted out within 8 minutes of going public, so that's pretty sweet. I deployed the collection on Thursday night, and it automatically did it's thing during the day on Fresh Mint Friday. If you want to check out the frogs collection, you can find it here: https://www.stargaze.zone/m/frogs/tokens

Now that frogs is deployed, I know how to deploy a mintable nft collection on stargaze with unique traits and rarities. This collection was an awful lot of fun to create, and I have a "frog generation engine" that can create around 18 billion permutations of different frogs based on all of the traits I drew. I used this engine to generate only 320 frogs, so I'm going to use the engine again to generate another ~3,800 frogs and launch a side collection tentatively named "frog pfps" where holders of frogs will receive an airdrop, and the rest of the frogs will be mintable on stargaze.

The reason why I'm doing this is because I need to learn how to do an airdrop, and I wanted to extend the collection of frogs with a profile picture collection. This collection is going to be 4,200 pictures of frogs with little picture frames around them. They are designed to be used as a PFP or "ProFile Picture" which is a popular thing amongst nft collector communities. I hope this collection does well enough that some people actually change their pfp to a frog. That would be the highlight of my artistic endeavors:

The thing that is good about doing this collection, is that I will get to learn how to airdrop nfts to specific wallets. Also, because the collection is substantially larger than my first collection (actually 10x larger), I will get to test out my ability to generate thousands (as opposed to hundreds) of nft images via my art engine build in Python. I'm curious to know how long the engine has to run for it to generate all 4,200 pieces. I haven't finished all of the art for this collection, as I would like to create several different picture frames and I'd like to modify some of the color filters on some specific frogs to give the collection a bit more variety, but my goal is to finish this by the end of February (so I have basically just tomorrow night to do this), so that I can focus on the next big collection I'm working on in March called Puppy Cerberus. more on that later.

52 weeks of huahua

Last and not least, let's talk about 52 weeks of huahua. I started this little experiment in December, and we are now on week 13. I have purchased over 1 million huahua. Last week my weekly purchases were on average down by about 50% - because Bitcoin is pumping, huahua has spiked substantially, and now my huahua is up by about 30%. Here's the price of huahua over the past 3 months for reference:

That giant spike is when i started the initiative. Memecoins behave this way. There's usually a huge impulse / spike in price, and then as people take profits, the price gradually winds down to a floor. If the memcoin has a strong base of holders, or any sort of interesting utility or narrative, the new floor is still much higher than the previous floor, but much lower than the tippy top of the spike. You can see that the new floor leveled off around $0.0002 after spiking at around $0.001.

I've been accumulating huahua in that floor range of $0.0002. After the bitcoin pump, huahua pumped to around $0.0003. This strategy is banking on several even bigger spikes than that first one that occurred in mid-December. For reference, in the previous bull market, huahua peaked at very close to $0.01. The ultimate ideal scenario is for huahua to pump all the way back to those levels, whereby I will promptly take massive profits. Chances of success? less than 100%, more than 0%.

Okay that's all for tonight folks, hope you enjoy the rest of your weeks and have a wonderful night/morning/afternoon.

Cheers!

-Flarn

Welcome back to the flarnchain newsletter, brought to your inbox each and every week, like an atomic clock.

Listen, I don't have a ton of time to write this newsletter, so I'm going to rip through this pretty quickly. Lightening round:

1. Gemini, the crypto exchange that defaulted during the previous bear market, is back on the advertising trail as I received an email from them recently. This exchange is run by the Winklevoss twins, who are rich bitcoin holders who also are characters in the movie "The Social Network"

2. Blockfi, another crypto exchange / CeFi platform (CeFi stands for "Centralized Finance", it's dumb, I know, I don't come up with the terminology), that also defaulted during the previous bear market, is currently working through bankruptcy proceedings and I think some of the money that was tied up during the process will be released to users of the platform... actually... I don't exactly know what's going on with blockfi. I had about $10 on the platform. I was expecting to get nothing back. I try my best to move most of my crypto into self-custody wallets, because exchanges can blow up. Blockchains can blow up too, but at least you got to be a part of something cool. I'd rather go down with the "blockchain" ship, than some sort of synthetic non-custodial wallet "centralized exchange connected to a blockchain" ship.

3. An nft collection by me will be released on the stargaze blockchain this week. It's called frogs. I've been working on it for over a month, an hour or two at night.

Markets

Markets were flat this week. Bitcoin stayed above $50k, and Ethereum jumped up above $3k for a few moments there. Markets are taking a breather in general this week and kind of choppy, probably just another resting point before the next leg up to... I dunno $55k? In other news, Stargaze nft markets have been going bonkers, and if those break into the mainstream then anyone who has been reading my newsletter and following the nft projects that I like to talk about... you might be doing pretty good right now.

Speaking of nfts - I made a generated art collection of frogs called "frogs" which will be deployed on the stargaze blockchain this friday. I've set up the configuration of the collection where I can just deploy it tomorrow night, and everything will just... happen based on the configuration file I created tonight. In honor of that collection, tonight's market animal is a frog . First frog market animal so far in 159 newsletters.

Let's talk a bit more about frogs, and then end tonight early:

1. Frogs will go live around 19:00 UTC. If you are on the whitelist, you can mint 1 frog for 123 stars (~$6.40 at current prices).

2. After about 4 hours at 23:00 UTC, frogs will go live for public mint, where any wallet can mint 3 frogs for 234 stars (~$12.16 at current prices).

3. I'm using a "splits" smart contract which is a piece of code that lives on the stargaze blockchain that is designed to split proceeds from the mint, as well as any proceeds from trading royalties 5 different ways (20%, 20%, 20%, 20%). Here's how it's being split:

   1. 20% to me.

   2. 20% to the proto towers collaborator wallet (which is then split 19 different ways based on a custom transaction builder I built using the DAODAO ui).

   3. 20% to the proto towers DAO treasury, which is just going to accumulate funds until the DAO members figure out what the heck to do with it.

   4. 20% to frogstar, a guy who inspired me to create this collection of frogs.

   5. 20% to the 'smokers club' wallet, because these guys did a lot to help promote Proto Towers.

Okay, that all took a very long time to write. Just to stay consistent, here's a quick update on 52 weeks of HUAHUA: I used some proto towers sales to buy 250k HUAHUA, pushing the HUAHUA wallet over 1 million HUAHUA. the price of HUAHUA is down about 50% since I started this experiment 12 weeks ago.

Above is an animated frog that will be part of the collection of frogs. I hope it gave you some joy.

If you read this far, thanks for reading.

Hope you enjoy the rest of your week.

Cheers!

-Flarn