Until recently, I would simultaneously protest ‘But the tech is awesome!’ while also nodding in agreement. I was torn, never sure whether hyperfinancialization was really a bad thing if crypto was also working to disintermediate layers of extraction while giving people tools to live a more free life. But I never really gave it a lot of thought. Until recently. Until I became hyperstitious. 

Hyperstition Is the Prerequisite

Although I’d seen the word ‘hyperstition’ before, I never really knew what it meant. A couple of months ago I saw a post from Gitcoin’s Kevin Owocki: 

I wasn’t trolling when I asked how he defined ‘hyperstition’; I really wanted to know. It turns out hyperstition is a mid-90s word from the same minds who first articulated the techno-cult thesis of ‘accelerationism’. Hyperstition was loosely defined by its originator, Nick Land, as a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop, enabled by techno-capitalist systems, that manifests cultural elements into reality.

In other words, futuristic ideas that resonate become culturally embedded through recognition and repetition at scale, influencing the present and driving progress in that direction. According to Land, “(h)yperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality.”

Hyperstition collapses the boundary between fiction and reality by exploiting feedback loops between belief, action, and material conditions. Or as William S. Burroughs said, “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”.

Hyperfinancialization as Capitalized Hyperstition

Hyperfinancialization is the idea that capitalism has become more than the financial layer for modern society; it is modern society. Financial products are no longer limited to stocks, bonds, bank accounts, derivatives, and other legacy assets. Rather, everything becomes financialized. 

We sell our time by the minute or hour, speculate on attention with memecoins and information with prediction markets, while self-branding and influencer culture has commodified our identity. As Nick Land said, “capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force”.

Hyperfinancialization is hyperstition with money, the capitalization of everything, everywhere, all at once. Nick Land and his fellow academics didn’t know Bitcoin was a decade away, let alone that over 50,000,000 tokens would be launched in its wake. But their insight was on the money: when culture and capital move at hyperspeed in an intertwined mass of monied memetic momentum, large-scale change is inevitable.

Of course the tricky part is determining what kind of change is inevitable. Most of the culture around the future is dystopic, dark, ruled by scarcity, fear, and absolute power: from the interstellar space battles of Star Wars to the junkyard deserts of Mad Max and the steaming, teeming cities of Blade Runner. Nowhere is there a vision that decentralized financial technologies help to shape the kind of future you would want to live in. Crypto is not part of the story. Yet. 

One of the more interesting stories to tell is to envision how hyperfinancialization will intertwine with artificial intelligence and robotics. Will each autonomous agent — whether a robot in your kitchen ordering groceries or an always-on-call personalized AI assistant  — use crypto to transact? If we tax each of those transactions at 0.0001%, does that enable some kind of universal basic income? In the end, is it hyperfinancialization that saves humanity? 

Shaping the Present Tomorrow 

To date, crypto has made little dent in our legacy social and creative institutions, partly because we are failing to elucidate positive crypto-centric pre-hyperstitions, to tell transformative stories about why crypto matters. Crypto provides the tools to enable us to have more control over our future, to give us more agency, authority, and autonomy within the present system, to change the system. In this pre-hyperstition, crypto-powered hyperfinancialization enables us each to align what we produce with capital, on an instantaneous, global scale. It may also be the rails on which other future technologies of the present, the AI and robotics of today, do their work. But not unless we tell that story.

There is also my favorite story, a tale about a crypto-powered, techno-nature utopia, the solarpunk world, where we find new ways to align effort, incentives, and value to create a system that is as sustainable as it is beautiful and abundant. But this vision, and others even more marvelous, won’t manifest unless we put in the work: educate, build, and ensure that the cultural embeds that stick for tomorrow aren’t simply those of a dystopic, oppressive future, but of value created together while building our collective future, one empowered individual at a time, tyranny not included.

Author Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats. She is cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

A common bitcoin proxy for use in decentralized finance applications, Wrapped BTC (or simply wBTC) lives primarily on the Ethereum blockchain. However, through the Wormhole protocol, over 3,300 wBTC has been bridged to Solana, valued at roughly $360m at the time of publication.

That may sound like a lot, but it’s only around 2.5% of the 128,850 wBTC that has been minted on Ethereum. Further, the vast majority of the wBTC on Solana is privately held or locked in DeFi apps. When it comes to liquid wBTC available for swaps, there is only about 50 wBTC across 30 liquidity pairs!

This is extremely shallow liquidity for the top BTC proxy on arguably the third most important blockchain. So X’s Oversized Moose With Socks (xlmoose.eth), a full stack developer, is attempting to corner that supply using a memecoin. He launched SATFI, self-described as ‘The Bitcoin Supply Shock Token on Solana’.

The token was fair-launched on June 28, 2025, with an initial market cap of $100k and a supply of 100m tokens, memetic homages to the current price of bitcoin ($100k+), and the number of satoshis in one BTC (100m ‘sats’). The based dev explains much of his thinking about SATFI in the introductory thread linked below.

Oversized Moose With Socks (xlmoose.eth)

@undacappn

Getting questions about how $Satfi works, what the plan is, etc. I will do my best to explain it without being too confusing, please excuse my autism

118

9:58 AM • Jul 6, 2025

Oversized Moose With Socks is an OG in the space, having mined bitcoin very early on in 2009. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to hold onto that original bag, on account of the mining being done on a work computer using his former company’s resources and one irate boss who didn’t understand the tech. While tragic, this ideal dinner-party backstory is just perfect in my opinion for a Bitcoin believer dev who is ready to turbocharge wBTC liquidity on Solana.

How SATFI Works

What makes SATFI unique is that all of its initial liquidity was in a wBTC pairing, unlike almost all memecoins on Solana, which pair primarily with SOL or USDC. There is no special mechanism involved to accrue wBTC, just the power of a concentrated-liquidity automated market making pool on Raydium with this ‘exotic pair’, wBTC-SATFI.

When a buyer enters an order for SATFI using SOL or stablecoins on one of Solana’s decentralized exchanges, the app will try routing to available liquidity pools in order to first swap the tokens offered by the buyer into wBTC. This wBTC is needed to access SATFI tokens, since almost all the SATFI liquidity resides in the wBTC-SATFI concentrated liquidity pool.

The routings into wBTC that are required to make the swap are typically abstracted away by the app, so most people don’t notice them; they only care how many tokens they are getting for their 5 SOL purchase, for example. But for each significant buy of SATFI, wBTC enters the liquidity pool. As the token increases in value, more and more wBTC gets locked into the pool.

At SATFI’s current market cap, just about 2.5 wBTC are locked in the liquidity pool. It’s not much now, for sure, but this is around 5% of the total wBTC available for swaps, and the token is barely one week old. There is a nice wBTC Supply Shock Tracker on the memecoin’s official site, squeezesats.com, showing up-to-the-minute metrics. If and when that number of locked wBTC gets to a significant percentage of the available wBTC on Solana, interesting things will start to occur.

Wrapped BTC doesn’t see a lot of trading volume on the chain. It’s currently somewhat of a park-cash-and-forget-about-it asset on Solana. The more people who trade SATFI, the more wBTC gets traded as well. It’s possible that folks inspecting the blockchain could notice the uptick in wBTC trading and discover the SATFI token through this volume, causing a virtuous cycle of increasing engagement and social media trending for the token. wBTC liquidity could get boosted by market makers looking to capture fees off of the added volume.

Eventually SATFI may grow to a market cap where a significant percentage of pooled wBTC on Solana is locked into the SATFI liquidity pool. The scarcity of wBTC liquidity can then lead to arbitrage opportunities. wBTC on Solana, being higher in demand, will have a small premium over wBTC on Ethereum. This will cause more wBTC to enter the Wormhole portal and bridge over to Solana, where it can be sold into the liquidity pools in order to capture that premium. 

Arbitrage is another mechanism for boosting wBTC liquidity on Solana. This is what is meant by a supply squeeze — the more wBTC is added to the liquidity pool to purchase SATFI, the less wBTC is available for all other purposes on Solana. If the SATFI market cap reaches about $15m, its pool would actually hold a majority of the liquid wBTC on Solana.

This is all fine and good, but what really strikes me about this experiment is its simplicity. This is not some complicated, supply-cornering tokenomics algorithm, it’s just a memecoin that employs a concentrated liquidity pool using wBTC as the pair. All the SATFI token needs in order to accomplish a dramatic change in Solana’s onchain bitcoin liquidity is attention and holders.

What Are the Longer-Term Implications? 

If SATFI is successful, there are sure to be copycats. Perhaps they will roll out somewhat slower than the usual derivatives would, since none of the one-click memecoin launchpads can handle wBTC as the primary liquidity pair at present. 

If this token starts a trend (as I suspect it might), we may see many popular coins launch with concentrated wBTC pairing. Established tokens on Solana could add their own wBTC liquidity. If wBTC liquidity isn’t rectified before then, this would multiply the supply shock effect and potentially ramp up the onchain wBTC liquidity on Solana dramatically. And in my opinion, a public backlash then becomes likely as people cope with the fact that memecoin volume is what is causing it — which will of course only add attention and lend more network effects to first-mover SATFI and its strategy.

Eventually, higher utilization of BTC on chains other than Bitcoin should lead to more wrapping of BTC into proxy tokens on alternate layer 1 blockchains and some natural, related stress-testing of these protocols, including the tools that allow for cross-chain bridging of tokens, like Wormhole. This also seems like a beneficial side effect. If any of these protocols are going to have issues, it would be much better to know this sooner rather than later. If we agree on the importance of bitcoin in finance at large, it’s important that the tools involved in employing BTC in DeFi are battle tested.

My favorite quote I got from a brief chat with Moose was the following:

“We have been pairing tokens with inflationary gas tokens… which makes it more expensive to use the chain… and they are terrible as a store of value.”

One can quibble about the level of inflationary risk for each of the popular blockchains’ native gas tokens, but the point is salient. As a corollary, let me pose a question to you, dear reader: 

Why is it that virtually no tokens on decentralized exchanges are paired with bitcoin? Wouldn’t you prefer that your conviction assets’ liquidity (memecoin or otherwise) be tied to the King?

Author Bio

Tomahawk enjoys writing and editing analysis on many cryptocurrency topics, with a particular interest in memecoin trading and investing. Fair disclosure: this author currently holds SATFI tokens at the time of publication.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats. She is a long-time contributor at Black Flag DAO and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

It's been a minute, and yet it feels like only weeks since we shipped this noble, aspirational piece by Hiro that espoused the glory of media that has not been bought by corporates. As a reminder, it said these things:

• Our ~20,000 subscribers will never see an advertisement or sponsored article, and that’s because crypto desperately needs independent media, now more than ever.

• The absence of financial motivation means that we are free to ship whatever we want.

• I imagine sometimes we’ll be shipping with real regularity; other times it may be a few weeks before the next piece comes out – whatever it takes to stay independent and free, both in cost and ethos.

• But if we allow the corporate voice to dominate the discourse yet again, then we will have failed. I, for one, am not yet ready to fail. 

Well.
We clearly shot ourselves in the foot with that. The bullet passed through the meta-farcical bone and into our creative hearts.

The remedy? A slight revision to the revulsion of receiving payment to produce content. This is not a full reversal, though. Both of us stand by the independent ethos of IndyPen, but we've reconsidered the notion that we will never accept a financial reward for publishing content. Specifically: if we feel that an article can be written in a way that is informative, entertaining, and low on shill, and we are aligned with the values of the org willing to pay for that, then we'll do it.

In short, the "absence of financial motivation" closed a few doors that we'd like to re-open, but we couldn't do that without being transparent and accountable to you, our valued subscribers.

That's it for now :)

Author and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats. She is a long-time contributor at Black Flag DAO and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia.

Editor Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia, buidler at Black Flag DAO, and governator at DAOplomats. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication.
We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

This article was first conceived as an explainer on AI agents, but in the time that has passed since that idea a few weeks ago and today’s commitment to just get this bloody thing finished, I decided that there are some great and/or interesting explainers already written:

• Upcoming trends in Q1 for the agent meta by YB.

• AI Agents x Crypto X post and Github Repo by Sophia Dew of Celo.

• Crypto & Vice: NSFW AI Agents Exponential Potential (unsure if this was advertorial but yikes!).

• 69 trends in 2025-era DAO design by Kevin Owocki on X. 

• The A.I. Agent Supercycle: A Guide to the Best Infrastructure Plays by Edgy on X.

So really, this piece is my attempt at unclenching various parts of my thinking about humanity’s great passion for replacing ourselves with machines.

I’ve been flip-flopping between delight at the fun and novel applications of AI and AI agents, which are easy and entertaining to experiment with; and a desire to warn you against the kind of corporate-controlled, ubiquitously AI-fuelled future that I can effortlessly imagine. I think this tech is on the fence right now, and we can't afford to remain passive.

I can’t quite get past the idea that we are somehow putting the last nail in the coffin of human agency and intelligence, perhaps even that of humanity’s existence. And yet I can also catch glimpses of zen-level societal improvement, a future in which by harnessing AI’s aggregational and predictive power we have finally worked out how to exist on this planet (our only home) without stressing the environment beyond its limits.

In spite of all the good that may come, here are the parts that bother me, in no particular order:

In this recorded interview about her book, Data Cartels, law professor Sarah Lamdan highlights the skyrocketing value of data, particularly the example of academic publishers evolving into purveyors of “business insights” — selling the information they have already monetized via research databases for use as AI-training data for potentially harmful (certainly biased) predictive algorithms in sectors such as insurance, policing, and banking.

According to this Wired article the U.S is happy to take investment from wherever, in order to maintain AI market leadership. Whether it’s questionable influence and/or potential IP leakage by the UAE, as the Wired article explains, or China’s documented use of AI in military, cyber-influence, and surveillance applications, it’s concerning to me that AI development is dominated by players who care more about progress, profit, and power than human rights, privacy, and equitable outcomes.

So what will the result of externalising the intellectual effort needed to write, create, research, compose, and design be? My fear is that we will be left bereft, and I’m not the only person who thinks so:

There’s an endless drive for productivity and growth associated with AI — the idea that AI will empower us to achieve more efficiency and further economic and industrial expansion. Not only does this narrative conveniently ignore the question of how those who lose jobs to AI will afford to live, but it's also at odds with our precarious planetary situation which in my humble opinion would benefit from a degrowth approach.

As the authors of this article note, we’re at risk of painting ourselves into a corner if we don’t stop to consider the impacts of making AI ubiquitous:

“AI itself is becoming an infrastructure that many services of today and tomorrow will depend upon. Considering the vast environmental consequences associated with the development and use of AI, of which the world is only starting to learn, the necessity of addressing AI alongside the concept of infrastructure points toward the phenomenon of carbon lock-in.

Carbon lock-in refers to society’s constrained ability to reduce carbon emissions ... due to the inherent inertia created by entrenched technological, institutional, and behavioral norms. That is, the drive for AI adoption in virtually every sector of society will create dependencies and interdependencies from which it will be hard to escape.”

Which leads me to…

I’m hopeful that the research on green AI (green-by AI and green-in AI) will continue to expand, because right now, AI is the colour of pollution. Most of the research into the environmental impact of AI has centred on the energy used to train large language models, which leads to significant carbon dioxide emissions, as illustrated in this graph:

The authors who produced this graph further note that “using these systems also has a cost. As an example, GPT-3 was accessed 590 million times in January 2023, leading to energy consumption equivalent to that of 175,000 persons. Moreover, in inference time, each ChatGPT query consumes energy equivalent to running a 5 W LED bulb for 1hr 20 min, representing 260.42 MWh per day.”

It’s not just about energy and emissions though; this research paper introduces a method for assessing the impact of ‘AI as a service’, encompassing training, inference, online hosting, and end-user terminals (e.g. phone or desktop computer). Using Stable Diffusion as a case study, they calculated that one year of use led to “360 tons of carbon-equivalent emission, an impact on metal scarcity equivalent to the production of 5659 smartphones, and an energy footprint of 2.48 Gigawatt hours”.

This is energy use at industrial scale; just one Gigawatt hour could power about 300 million smartphone charges. It certainly gives me pause to consider the number of iterations I generated to arrive at my earlier image of the ‘pink metallic humanoid robot sitting on a fence looking thoughtful’.

So far, the crypto-specific AI narrative has been frothing about using AI agents in DeFi (#DeFAI) and trading, improving the web3 user experience, and enabling features such as autonomous investments, voting, and community management for DAOs. Really though, we’re all hyper-aware that for many people, AI agent tokens are this cycle’s new ‘meta’ i.e. the latest excuse to play the casino. I'm not immune; I FOMO’d into very small amounts of Virtual, GAME, and aixbt only to see them crash recently when the release of Chinese startup’s DeepSeek-R1 model sent tech stocks and crypto tokens tumbling.

With the release of the Venice.ai token VVV, things got a little testy on Crypto Twitter, and once again I thought ‘Sigh, there has to be more to it, surely?’

While pondering all this I did find a Bankless article which puts forward the idea that blockchain can enhance the experience of using AI agent services through the provision of permissionless payment rails, alongside the transparency benefit of decentralised networks. Now that I can get behind.

Likewise, there’s evidence that the combined application of AI and blockchain technologies improves supply chain performance. Look at how AI boosts the blockchain efficiency advantage here:

My hope is that once some of the hype subsides, web3 builders will find new and amazing use cases which combine blockchain technology with artificial intelligence applications. No doubt there are already project teams in the public goods, regen, and educational spaces of crypto who are dreaming big and looking for support. I’d love to hear about them.

I’ve not explored it properly yet, but the SingularityNET ecosystem appears to be aligned with the pursuit of positive AI applications. Its stated mission is “creating a decentralized, democratic, inclusive and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence. An ‘AGI’ that is not dependent on any central entity, that is open for anyone and not restricted to the narrow goals of a single corporation or even a single country.” Also check out Mother, “a decentralized network where AI agents work, govern, and grow. Powered by community, driven by purpose”.

I guess it’s clear by now: I’m several types of AI skeptic. You could say I’ve got dem LLM Blues. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s real or that I think it completely sucks, just that I’m convinced that we must use our collective agency to prevent it from cementing our climate catastrophe, and to steer it in directions that don’t discriminate against and disenfranchise citizens.

Allowing AI power to develop and become the status quo without attention to its impact is a sure path to a future where AI runs rampant, grabbing pussy and ignoring felony charges left right and centre. Hell, it could even become President.

In So You Want to Escape the Algorithm, Elan Ullendorff writes that avoiding algorithms is near impossible, and instead recommends staying intentional and thinking critically, leaning in to explore the cracks and crevices to find the humanity. To me, humans are infinitely more interesting than AI. If you’re looking for a strategy to not just cope with AI but to thrive, I highly recommend Packy McCormick’s post titled Most Human Wins.

I’ll leave the last word to Vitalik Buterin:

“We, humans, continue to be the brightest star. The task ahead of us, of building an even brighter 21ˢᵗ century that preserves human survival and freedom and agency as we head toward the stars, is a challenging one. But I am confident that we are up to it.”

Author and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats. She is a long-time contributor at Black Flag DAO and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia.

Editor Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia, buidler at Black Flag DAO, and governator at DAOplomats. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

So why was my meme port down 10–50%? And why was Solana pushing all-time highs? It was then that I checked Telegram and realized that Donald Trump, who will be sworn in Monday as President of the United States of America, had launched an Official Trump Memecoin three days before his inauguration. By the time I had made breakfast, TRUMP was one of the most valuable crypto assets on the planet, with a market valuation of over $6 billion, gaining nearly 17,000% in a matter of hours. There’s crypto, and then there’s crypto at the Speed of Trump.

Trump is coming into office as the first pro-crypto president in U.S. history. Whatever you think of Trump launching a coin, this isn’t new territory for him. He has his NFT collection on Polygon, and World Liberty, his Ethereum-based DeFi project. What Trump has done is much bigger than him, even if that’s hard to imagine. I didn't hold any TRUMP when I began this article, but I do now, so maybe some bag-bias here, but here are a few quick takeaways from the morning after:

1. All other coins were vamped within minutes of TRUMP launching, and basically every token of every kind was being sold or swapped for TRUMP. The one exception was SOL — being what most use to buy TRUMP — and at one point it blew past its own high while obliterating the SOL/ETH pairing, which has been up only since mid-2023.

2. One of the main questions is whether this opens the door for celebrities of all kinds to begin launching “official” memecoins. We’ve seen a number of b-list celebrities and people famous for being dicks launch coins in 2024. It’s hard to imagine this number doesn’t increase dramatically in the coming months.

3. The TRUMP launch wasn’t a low-liquidity pump.fun token; it was launched with enormous liquidity, more than nearly every token ever made. With a market cap of $5.7 billion, there’s $500 million in liquidity. That’s just not heard of; it’s never been done before.

This matches TradFi levels of liquidity. PEPE used to be the top liquidity meme at $64 million. Now it can’t even see TRUMP through that coin’s dust.

4. Such deep liquidity satisfies one of TradFi’s biggest complaints about investing in crypto – that there isn’t enough liquidity to make large trades without destroying the market for the token. TRUMP is a memecoin built to be bought by institutions. In fact, it seems like that has to be part of the plan. You want to show allegiance to Trump, buy a shitload of TRUMP.

5. That TRUMP launched on Solana solidifies that network’s dominance this cycle. If there were any questions left unanswered there, there shouldn’t be anymore. Solana is the network where action happens.

6. That said, World Liberty deployed on Ethereum. This makes sense, as World Liberty is a DeFi protocol. Ethereum is the home of DeFi and Solana is the home of memecoins, so these choices reveal that Trump’s team knows enough about crypto to know which chains to use for which projects.

7. At some point very soon, the market will normalize to this new world and liquidity will begin to flow back to other tokens in earnest. Solana memes should benefit most from this waterfall of profits, but just as we saw nearly all assets drop, most will recover. Those that don’t recover quickly, well, the writing’s probably on the wall. I know I’ll be jeeting a few long-term bags after this.

8. I swung between bearish and bullish in the first hours after the launch, but have since come to the conclusion that this is incredibly bullish for crypto over a long timeframe. TRUMP partnered with Moonshot, a user-friendly crypto app that requires zero knowledge of wallets or keys and enables anyone to buy crypto with a debit card. In fact, the alpha hit Moonshot before anywhere else. Those in the trenches have been wondering whether Moonshot is this cycle’s Robinhood; I think TRUMP provides an affirmative response to that question.

9. As of 8pm UTC on Saturday, Moonshot is the 48th most popular download in Apple’s App Store and #1 in the Finance category. The amount of TRUMP traffic through that app is pretty crazy at ~$170 million, nearly 1/15 of the total volume at present:

   

But the number of Moonshot users is what’s truly to behold. All herald the long-lost retail investor:

10. Non-crypto folks are probably in for a ride, as whales dump on new buyers in the short term, but over a longer time span TRUMP will onboard millions to crypto. At 24 hours after launch, TRUMP has nearly 600,000 holders. I expect that number to be 1 million in no time. For many of these holders, it will be the first crypto they buy. But it won’t be the last.

11. The TRUMP launch was actually really good. As far as I can tell, Moonshot and Meteora, the protocol providing liquidity for TRUMP, didn’t leak details of the launch. The supply is limited to 1 billion, with 80% of the supply locked. There's a 36-month vesting schedule, which is set to begin unlocking in three months, nearly coinciding with the end of Trump’s first 100 days in office, an important milestone in American politics.

12. And yet, one reason TRUMP mooned was because it was tightly controlled. We already know that 80% of the tokens are held by the team and locked, but other top wallets may be controlled by team members too. If you look at Bubblemaps, you can see the connected wallets both shortly after launch:

and 24 hours later:

13. Trump’s team is known to be crypto curious, experienced even, and this launch proves it. I think it’s totally reasonable to extrapolate that the promised executive orders around crypto within his first few days in office will not just be executed, but will also be well-thought-out.

14. Paul Atkins, nominated by Trump to lead the SEC, was an SEC Commissioner two decades ago, and in 2017 he joined the Token Alliance, a crypto advocacy group. He is likely to reverse Gensler’s war on crypto with haste. Bullish.

15. We’ve been calling for sensible crypto regs in the U.S. for a very long time now, but I actually think we’ll finally get them. The SEC and CFTC (which also has jurisdiction to regulate crypto assets) are enforcement agencies but they don’t make the rules, Congress does. Trump is coming into office with a Republican Congress, and numerous draft regulation bills that have been circulating in those hallowed halls for years. There are bills to regulate stablecoins and bills to provide structure for the crypto market, and there’s some speculation that these bills could be taken up ASAP. Who knows, maybe we get regulation before the end of his first 100 days in office; it seems certain that we will have them in 2025.

16. None of this even begins to mention the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, let alone the crypto strategic reserve, which would hold other digital assets too. Suffice to say, if the U.S. actually passed crypto market regs AND started to HODL digital assets on its balance sheet, you would be a pessimist indeed not to believe that that’s just the start of larger sovereign nations (yes, I see you El Salvador) to also begin putting crypto on the books.

17. Can you even imagine how much more excited Trump is about crypto, now that he has launched what he’ll surely call “The Greatest Cryptocurrency In The History Of The World”? If he was ready to push crypto before, I can only assume that it’s all he can think about at the moment. This may be bad for world affairs, but it’s absolutely awesome for crypto. He’s not just a pro-crypto President, he’s a pro-crypto President who is now one of the most successful crypto entrepreneurs of all time. 

18. OMG THIS IS ALL SO BULLISH!

On the one hand, of course this is insanely bullish for crypto over a longer time frame. A crypto-friendly U.S. regime, pro-innovation, pro-crypto market regulation, onboarding the masses. Plenty will go wrong of course. The regulations could take too long or just be plain bad. The masses could (they will) get rekt by more sophisticated traders. Trump will get side-tracked with other matters, wars, borders, some new emergency.

But this is the inflection point we’ve been waiting for. Never have we had such a confluence of factors to begin laying the foundations for a long and prosperous future, for not just crypto in the U.S. but crypto everywhere. In the past, when the SEC sneezed, the cryptoverse became sick. But no longer. What happens when fear is removed and is replaced with encouragement from the U.S. political establishment and certainty from regulatory bodies? 

Whatever the next 100 days bring, they are going to be some of the most exciting for crypto watchers. Will the follow up I write in 100 days be the bullish optimism I hope it will be, or will it be mired by recounting missed opportunities, broken promises, and the regular political gridlock? I have no real idea what to expect, no one does, but anything is better than what we’ve come to expect out of Washington. And in some ways there’s nothing more bullish than that.

Author Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia, buidler at Black Flag DAO, and governator at DAOplomats. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats. She is a long-time contributor at Black Flag DAO and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

Since inception nearly one year ago, we have shipped a few articles, but to be honest, we were a bit worse for the wear after three years of burning the candle both ends at Bankless Publishing, and at least for me, I didn’t really have a sense of what IndyPen was or its point for existing outside of a place to ship with my dear fren. Part of that is because I’m a purpose-driven person, but we didn’t really have an articulated vision; we just knew we wanted to do something like we had been doing at Bankless Publishing.

I’m not sure it’s ironic, but in this space where we advocate for transparency and censorship resistance, crypto media is anything but. It took The Wall Street Journal, of all things, to report on CoinDesk’s firing of its top three editors after they wrote an article mildly critical of Tron founder Justin Sun’s $6.2M purchase — and subsequent consumption — of banana-based art. CoinDesk later deleted this article from their website, purportedly because Sun’s team complained not only to the editors, but to CoinDesk’s parent company, here-to-unknown crypto exchange Bullish.

It turns out, nearly all crypto media outlets have a master. The story of The Block, founded in 2018, makes for a good read. Initially backed by venture capital, it later received undisclosed funds from FTX-adjacent Alameda Research, leading to resignations and a later layoff of one-third of its staff, closely followed by a sale of an 80% stake to venture capital firm Foresight Ventures for $60 million. A few weeks ago, Axios reported that The Block is attempting another funding round.

Blockworks, begun by two founders in 2018 and the shipper of my favorite daily newsletter, took on $12 million of VC funding in 2023. On their website they assert that “[o]ur newsroom is completely independent. Our co-founders, owners and investors do not have input or visibility into what we choose to cover, when we cover it, or how we report on any story”. It’s hard not to think that those at CoinDesk once believed the same thing.

And then there is Decrypt, which spun out of crypto conglomerate Consensys in 2022, raising $10 million from VC firms and DAOs. I was excited for Decrypt’s independence from Consensys, as I have always been critical of the company’s ownership of both the most popular wallet in history, MetaMask, and also the primary infrastructure to communicate with Ethereum, Infura: a perfect recipe for a blockchain panopticon. No surprise I didn’t want them to also control a major crypto media outlet. For Decrypt to break away from Consensys was a positive development for the crypto media landscape, but I’m not so sure anymore, as these days many of the stories are “generated by AI, curated by humans”.

As crypto rapidly moves mainstream, we are seeing legacy media outlets cover our industry with increasing understanding of not just how blockchain works but some of the minutia that makes crypto culture special, putting corporate-owned crypto-native media into an even more desperate, and precarious position. Is this what you want the Future of France to look like?

I realized this is precisely why we need IndyPen CryptoMedia. Our ~20,000 subscribers will never see an advertisement or sponsored article, and that’s because crypto desperately needs independent media, now more than ever. If our readers like what we’re doing, that's enough. Maybe we’ll charge for minting articles at some point or throw up a ‘donate’ button, and years down the road we may make greater use of blockchain ponzinomics to help contributors (and founders) make a little money.

The absence of financial motivation means that we are free to ship whatever we want. But that also means we won’t ship all the time. We are not AIndependent CryptoMedia, so you won’t find us generating AI stories to fill space. For now, we’ll ship as often as we can. I imagine sometimes we’ll be shipping with real regularity; other times it may be a few weeks before the next piece comes out – whatever it takes to stay independent and free, both in cost and ethos. 

Many of us came to the cryptoverse to help build a better future because that’s the potential that this technology offers: the opportunity to empower and to liberate. But if we allow the corporate voice to dominate the discourse yet again, then we will have failed. I, for one, am not yet ready to fail. 

Thanks for being with us frens; we’re excited to be back.

Author Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia, buidler at Black Flag DAO, and governator at DAOplomats. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in the potential for web3 to disrupt fat cats, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia. She is a long-time contributor at Black Flag DAO despite living in the Southern Hemisphere.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

If you have used X to participate in the Crypto Twitter (CT) community for any length of time, you have likely seen scams involving airdrops, MetaMask support, MEV bots, and more. It certainly seems as though crypto gets inundated with the lion’s share of scams on the platform.

Much of the reason our community is such an attractive target for scammers is the lack of security controls, but a large part is users’ self-control. In many cases we’re the ones with custody of our assets, so their safety is often determined by our own security mindset. 

Our industry is working hard to address security through technologies like multi-sigs, transaction simulation, and drainer-site detection, but we can also protect our assets today by addressing personal security practices.

Although it does happen, you rarely hear about information security (InfoSec) practitioners in our community falling for these scams. But why is that? As someone who has done InfoSec work both in TradFi and crypto for the past few years, I attribute it to a security mindset that rarely turns off, helping InfoSec practitioners shrug off attempts at digital theft.

Nobody is born to be an InfoSec savant or have god-like hacking skills. These skills can be developed by anyone willing to put in the time and effort. There are four important skills that those working in this field possess and that you should consider adopting to keep your digital assets safe:

1. Pattern Matching

2. Preparation

3. Skepticism

4. Second-order Thinking

Intuit their flaws. Connect the dots.

Pattern matching is the ability to pick up subtle signals from unorganized data or malicious content. It enables you to apply a mental filter that catches the tell-tale signs of a scam that the operators hope you will miss.

As you gain exposure to both legitimate and malicious crypto content, you build up the street smarts similar to an InfoSec practitioner, enabling you to intuitively suss out scams rather than relying on others or tools (although these can certainly be useful too).

Here are some patterns to watch out for:

• Scammers frequently use fake X accounts to post crypto scams. They rely on people not noticing small changes to the user name and will often post scam links in a reply thread to the legitimate account, as happened in the example below.
  You can see there are subtle differences; always check the details and cross reference with other sources before you interact with any account posting such links.

• FOMO energy will be used against you, such as saying that an airdrop can only be claimed in the next hour or that most of the airdrop has already been claimed. Anything posted with a strong sense of urgency should be treated as suspicious and probably ignored.

• Using top-level domains (TLDs) that are not usually used by legitimate projects —scam projects are more likely to use TLDs like .claim, .gift, .ru, etc.

Keep It Real: We live in a time when the security cat and mouse game is rapidly progressing, making the cues you have learned less useful and introducing errors into your analysis. Try to pay attention to when your old patterns are no longer helpful.

Wield various tools. Expect the unexpected.

Preparation strengthens your ability to handle life’s curve balls. It enables you to creatively problem solve to reach the optimal end. The tools you prepare can be reused during future events, making you more efficient and ready for anything.

InfoSec practitioners are like pack rats when it comes to preparing for possible engagements. They collect information from data breaches, scripts to use when attacking or defending a target, and other digital artifacts. They also try to identify ways their existing tools can help them better prepare, such as taking advantage of hidden features in a security tool that most people tend to ignore.

Identify areas in your daily tasks that you can use as a resource to verify information and improve the health of your wallets:

• Follow established X accounts so you can use the 'Followers you know' feature to quickly tell if an X account with a new, amazing offer is likely spoofing another account.

• Bookmark the dApps you frequently use so you know the link is safe, and use a variety of sources (X accounts, Discord channels, non-sponsored search results) to verify the dApp URL you should be bookmarking.

• Set and follow rules for how and when you use your wallets, such as not signing any transactions with high-value wallets if it is late at night or you are distracted.

Keep It Real: Over-zealous preparation may encourage an unhealthy and time-consuming obsession with hoarding tools and techniques for very unlikely situations.

Shrug off rhetoric. Put claims through trial.

Skepticism smooths out the 'we’re-so-back' peaks and 'it’s-so-over' troughs when offers or ideas are presented to you. It enables you to critically examine claims and apply tests to verify or disprove them, irrespective of marketing hype or peer pressure.

When looking at the security of smart contracts, many will assume that a recently audited smart contract is safe , even if there have been minor changes in important code paths since the last audit. InfoSec practitioners would be skeptical of this and assume that until a new audit has been done that tests these minor changes, the contract is best considered unaudited.

Indeed, there have been many cases where supposedly minor changes to an upgradable smart contract or protocol lead to an eventual hack so it’s important to test claims made by a protocol or party if any variables change or were unknown until now.

Keep It Real: Skepticism can lead you down a dark road of pessimism, making you habitually disregard any opportunities before you or just make you intolerable to be around at parties.

Foresee the long tail. Avoid ruinous paths.

Second-order thinking helps you map out the potential consequences of present choices. It enables you to conceptualize the forks in the road, and the forks beyond those, and so on, helping you avoid dead ends that could lead you to mediocrity or ruin.

By thinking this way you become more aware of the risks and rewards that you may have to later confront. InfoSec practitioners routinely engage in this type of thinking, whether it’s to fully audit a smart contract or to reach an optimal level of privacy and security.

Let’s use a simple example of deciding whether to claim an unfamiliar token airdrop via a link you just saw posted on X. Once you weigh up the first and second order consequences, you may decide it’s not worth the risk:

• Reward: Gain tokens from the airdrop

  • Reward: Can use tokens to wield governance powers

  • Reward: Can sell tokens at a profit 

  • Reward: Can stake tokens to qualify for other airdrops

• Risk: May have to fulfill further criteria to claim the airdrop

  • Reward: Gain tokens from the airdrop

    • Reward: Can use these tokens to wield governance powers or sell at a profit

  • Risk: Spend more time to fulfill the criteria than the value of the tokens are actually worth

• Risk: Lose tokens from the airdrop that turned out to be a scam

  • Reward: Gain some humble experience from having been scammed

  • Risk: You may lose time having to ask the public or CEXs to help you recover or freeze the tokens

    • Reward: Receive some of your tokens back

    • Risk: Lose more tokens, and time, to a token recovery service scam

Keep It Real: Second-order thinking may overwhelm your mind in analysis paralysis after asking yourself “and then what?” too many times.

While the focus here is using these InfoSec skills to protect your digital assets, they can also guide your approach in other areas of your life.

Second-order thinking is likely already familiar to investors or entrepreneurs, as this is a mental model they often use to help make key decisions.

Scams and fake news are growing outside of our crypto village as well. Having a baseline level of skepticism can help you shrug off attempts at stealing your fiat wealth or see through weak arguments made in traditional or social media.

Author Bio

d0wnlore is a founding member of BanklessDAO's InfoSec Team and operates Protspec,a security UX studio building software and spreading education to help protect cryptonatives.

Editor Bios

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

If you’ve been part of the web3 ecosystem for the last few months, you’ve probably heard of Farcaster but might be confused about what it is. You’re not alone — even some people using Farcaster every day aren’t sure what it is! This article will lay it all out for you: what it is, how it differs from current social media, why that matters, and how to use it.

Farcaster Is a Protocol

You’ll often hear web3 projects calling themselves “protocols”, which means a lot to technically-inclined folks, but very little to the rest of the world. In plain language a protocol is a set of rules. Just as you follow a set of rules when you drive, so everyone can use the road safely, applications (apps) can follow rules to communicate with each other. In a recent Boys Club podcast, Dan Romero (co-founder of Farcaster) likened Farcaster to “email” and Warpcast to “gmail”; that is, email and Farcaster are protocols, and gmail and Warpcast are apps.

It’s a simple idea that has a lot of implications, the biggest being that there are multiple applications (also known as clients) you can use to interact with Farcaster. There are already dozens of apps that have been built using the Farcaster protocol. Here are some of my favourites:

• Warpcast is the client built by the Farcaster team.

• Supercast is a client geared towards power users and brands.

• Searchcaster is a quick way to search Farcaster data.

• 33bits is a tool to cast anonymously.

• Hatecast allows users to see who has followed/unfollowed them.

This open approach is in stark contrast to traditional social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit which both recently restricted access to their data. These sites previously offered access to their platform data to generate usage. Now that they have sufficient usage, it makes more financial sense for them to restrict access, shutting out dozens of independent developers and free apps.

Farcaster is different, though, because it is sufficiently decentralized.

Farcaster Is Sufficiently Decentralized

Decentralization has become a bit of a buzzword; what does it actually mean in the context of a social network? Varun Srinivasan, one of the Farcaster co-founders, wrote about his approach on his personal blog. He defines “sufficient decentralization” as existing if “two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it.”

This is the fundamental goal in Farcaster’s protocol architecture. Whereas a “fully decentralized” social network might hold ALL data on blockchain, a “sufficiently decentralized” social network only stores onchain the data that allows users to find each other and communicate.

In practice this means most user data (i.e. messages, profile info, followers) are held offchain on Hubs: “servers that store and validate Farcaster data”. Hubs use offchain cryptographic signatures to validate data. For example, you can be sure a message is coming from @links because it is signed with my private key and can be verified with my public key. Running a Hub is how one can read/write to Farcaster, and therefore required for any app that is building on Farcaster. Since every Hub must store a copy of the entire network, users must pay rent to keep their data on the Farcaster Hub network to prevent spam and keep the size of the network data manageable.

By separating onchain and offchain data, Farcaster has created a social network that CANNOT censor users while ensuring that cost and performance still work as average consumers would expect. This is a compromise that seems to work pretty well, especially when compared against a fully decentralized network like Lens, which can feel a bit sluggish from a UX perspective, or a fully centralized network like X, which can (and regularly does) censor users.

Farcaster Is for Creators

Of course the technology is only as good as the behaviour it enables, and Farcaster’s technology provides an environment ideal for creators. Writers, visual artists, software developers, and other creators of all stripes are engaging on Farcaster.

How does this work? Farcaster uses a concept called Channels: user-created, user-moderated spaces for like-minded people to get together. This simple but powerful concept allows users to 'drop down' from the cacophony of the home feed into a cozy space where they can discuss and share their craft.

Channels function similarly to subreddits, so what makes Farcaster different? The key is web3 integrations; every user on Farcaster has a non-custodial wallet, and Farcaster makes it easy for creators to get paid for their work. NFT mints are displayed prominently in feeds, encouraging other users to discover new pieces of work to mint and own onchain. Warps, Farcaster’s in-app currency, have reduced the difficulty even further, allowing users to mint NFTs without having to sign any transactions or pay gas fees. Frames (essentially mini-apps) make it even easier to connect to external services.

The results of these technologies are impressive. Artists like 0xen have been able to release trending NFT collections like FarCats, a surreal collection of purple cats. Podcasts like gmFarcaster have been able to bootstrap funding through patrons and sponsorships. Developers like jacek have been able to create $100M market cap memecoins. One of the most popular frames sold Girl Scout cookies directly to users using Coinbase Commerce

These examples are just a small sample of the thousands of creators using Farcaster to hone their crafts. Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message,” and the creator-centric tools Farcaster provides make it an ideal medium for creators.

What the Heck Are Frames?

Frames are mini-apps that live inside of a cast (a cast is a post). Frames have been used to build functionality like polls, 1-click blog subscriptions, 1-click NFT mints, and much more.

As a brand-new feature of Farcaster, Frames are rapidly evolving, but they typically consist of a single “screen” with multiple buttons you can click to interact. To use them, follow these best practices:

1. Read the cast body — there are typically instructions that will allow you to use the buttons in the Frame (such as like and recast this post, or follow a certain account)

2. Click on the buttons and see what happens. Some Frames take time to load, so wait a couple of seconds before clicking another button.

If you’re a developer and want to create Frames, check out the official documentation. You can also use Neynar to build on Farcaster quickly without running your own Hub.

Farcaster

Corbin Page 🎩 on Warpcast

I've categorized 100s of Frames over the past month so you don't have to! 😅 Here are the 5 Categories that all Frames fall into! 📋 Join /topframes for more Frame alpha next week... 👀 https://frames.neynar.com/f/8ae07c8c/b06cee80

Farcaster Is Easy to Use

Farcaster takes a pragmatic approach to product development, so they aim to make their user experience as easy as possible. To get started, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://warpcast.com/.

2. Download the app (it’s required to sign up).

3. Follow the steps to create an account:

   1. You can optionally backup your account’s recovery phrase.

   2. You can optionally link your external web3 wallet, which is a great idea if you have one.

4. Follow the steps to rent some storage as an in-app purchase. If you’d prefer to pay by crypto, you can rent storage using CastStorage.

5. Check out the Explore tab (the magnifying glass) to find channels that you may enjoy — sign up for as many channels as you like (the more the merrier).

6. Check out your main feed to see what’s hot, and drop down into channels to have more focused discussions with people who share your interests.

7. If you’re confused about something — ASK! Most casters are pretty friendly and willing to explain concepts, and there are even channels like /afraid-to-ask for beginners, and /purple which is filled with people committed to proliferating Farcaster.

What the Heck Is $DEGEN?

$DEGEN is a memecoin (ERC-20 token) that was launched on Farcaster by @jacek. If you’ve never been part of a memecoin community, it might be interesting and educational for you to take part. Be warned: memecoins can (and often do) lose value rapidly, so only experiment with money you are willing to lose.

Follow these steps to get going:

1. Check out https://www.degen.tips/ and connect with the external wallet you’ve connected to Farcaster.

2. Give out $DEGEN as tips:

   1. Navigate to Points > Airdrop 2 and scroll down to see your daily $DEGEN tip balance.

   2. On Farcaster, respond to casts with x $DEGEN to “tip” for casts you like (500 $DEGEN, for example).

3. Buy some $DEGEN:

   1. Get some ETH on BASE (easiest via Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet).

   2. Swap ETH for DEGEN on Uniswap.

4. Earn LP rewards:

   1. Go to the 0.3% ETH/DEGEN pool on Uniswap and add liquidity (you’ll need to be connected to Uniswap on BASE and have both DEGEN and ETH in your wallet).

   2. Navigate to Points > Liquidity Mining on degen.tips and check out your current reward balance.

Join the community: there are tons of fellow $DEGEN holders on Farcaster who are experimenting with the token, building projects, and figuring out how to get more people involved. Drop into /degen to learn more.

Farcaster Is the Future

There’s a lot to explore on Farcaster, but taking a step back reveals Farcaster to be much more than a typical social media platform. Unlike the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, Farcaster is being built in a way to allow all stakeholders (creators, consumers, patrons) to have a seat at the table.

On Farcaster creators own their audiences and make money for their efforts, consumers can verify the person they are talking to is the real deal, and patrons can have direct access to talented and undiscovered creators. This is the promise of web3, and it’s happening RIGHT NOW in an easy-to-use, non-technical package.

Many influencers have pontificated that some sort of breakthrough consumer product is needed to show the world what web3 can do. It’s very likely that product already exists, and it is Farcaster.

Author Bio

links is a web2 product leader and startup artist seeking inspiration in web3.

Editor Bios

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

I’m not a Trekkie, but I’ve watched a bit of Star Trek in my time. The saying “Beam me up Scotty” is burned into my consciousness. They made it look so easy — each person’s atoms would disassemble and then safely reassemble on the surface of whichever planet the crew was ‘exploring’ that week.

Sometimes I think about crypto tokens as being similar to those disassembled atoms, in that many crypto holders move tokens around between various chains, depending on where they’re needed or can most benefit the holder. My experience to date has largely been confined to the Ethereum ecosystem, which is — naturally — dominated by the Ethereum Layer 1 blockchain. While there are plenty of options for holding tokens away from the L1, they are all secondary in form and function to the Ethereum settlement layer, and they all require the use of bridges to move tokens back and forth.

Recently, I’ve learned more about the Cosmos ecosystem and its use of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) to facilitate data transfer throughout this ‘network of networks’. It’s a very different direction to that taken by Ethereum, where users’ actions are enabled by smart contracts which all run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In contrast, Cosmos is designed for applications to operate on an independent blockchain, connected to a web of blockchains by IBC.

Getting Inter the Zones

It had never really sunk in for me that Cosmos itself is not a blockchain. Rather, it’s known as the “Interchain” because it is a system of interoperable but independent Layer 1 blockchains. Each of these chains is focused on a specific function such as staking or data availability, and each functions with its own validators and consensus mechanism. 

These blockchains are known as “zones”, and many, but not all, are built using the Cosmos SDK which is “an open-source framework for building multi-asset public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains”; in other words it provides the components developers need to create the blockchain they want. According to the Map of Zones, a Cosmos network explorer, there are 87 zones (82 active in the last 30 days) at the time of writing.

IBC Bridges the Gap

In the Cosmos ecosystem, the Cosmos Hub is the main blockchain that connects and facilitates communication between the different zones. The facilitated communication between all the zones is what I find so interesting about Cosmos — and it’s achieved using the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). It’s the IBC that allows users to ‘beam’ tokens effortlessly between chains, and it’s an impressive user experience compared to using Ethereum. You could say I’ve been ‘struck by the ‘smooth liminal'.

Here’s the analogy: whereas an Ethereum-based Star Trek crew have to find and move to a different ‘bridging’ ship, trust an unknown, fallible, or potentially malicious crew, and hope they arrive at their single destination 30 minutes or more later, a Cosmos-based crew can have transported to and from all sorts of places in that time, for less cost and without reliance on a third-party provider. That’s the power of the IBC.

“… unlike most bridging solutions, IBC uses no trusted third parties. This means that if you trust two particular chains to use the functions they provide (and by default their consensus mechanisms), then there is no additional trust assumption required while using IBC to interact between said chains.

IBC is also more than just a bridge that facilitates token transfers. It is a general-purpose message passing protocol. This means that any form of data can be communicated over IBC.”

The quote above is from a very easy-to-read explanation of IBC, which is a good start if you’re interested in a little more technical detail. There’s also a ton of technical information in the tutorials on the Cosmos Developer Portal.

Two Layers, One Standard

So how does it work? According to the IBC developer documentation, the protocol is modelled on the TCP/IP specification, which is the communication standard which underpins the internet. Standards are the foundation of technical interoperability; machines are oblivious to communication that they do not recognise.

Explaining the intricacies of how disparate blockchains communicate with one another is beyond my understanding, so I’ll keep it very basic. There are two layers within the IBC technical stack: a transport layer and an application layer.

The transport layer is purely for moving data packets around. It does not interpret transaction data, only ensuring it is relayed securely, remains intact, and can be verified. Any form of encoded data can be communicated via IBC. While fungible token transfers are an obvious use case, it’s also possible to send NFTs and oracle data.

The data is interpreted and actioned on the application layer; this is where users interact with the protocol — initiating and approving transactions or executing smart contracts. Applications (end-user products) are built using composable code modules which can be tailored to specific use cases relevant to the particular chain’s purpose.

The diagram below provides a simple overview of how IBC works, but there is a comprehensive explanation in this blog post, titled Getting Started with IBC: What are the IBC transport and application layers?

Is This the Future?

IBC is not restricted to Cosmos blockchains. According to this IBC FAQ, it’s technically possible to use IBC to connect to blockchain ecosystems like Polkadot and Ethereum, with more than 100 blockchains currently IBC-enabled.

This blog post by Toki, which is “the first IBC bridge to connect Ethereum, BSC, and Cosmos”, provides some good examples of how other blockchains are beginning to use the IBC standard:

• Ethereum <> Cosmos: Composable Finance, Polymer Labs, TOKI, Union

• Ethereum <> BNB Smart Chain: TOKI

• Polkadot <> Cosmos: Composable Finance

• Avalanche <> Cosmos: Landslide

• Near <> Cosmos: Octopus Network

Source: Why EVM Chains Pay Attention to IBC

I mentioned atoms earlier in the context of Star Trek teleportation, but of course ATOM is also the primary token of the Cosmos Hub, through which holders contribute to security and governance of the chain. 

In this Just Crypto interview, which includes an informative overview of initiatives happening now in the Cosmos Interchain, researcher Carter Woetzel of ATOM Accelerator DAO suggests that the development of ATOM as ‘interchain money’ is a key direction for the Cosmos ecosystem, enabled by IBC:

“... the reason I think “ATOM is interchain money” is the story that makes the most sense is because IBC and people spinning up new Cosmos chains — that is the thing that's going to be exponential 10 years from now; that's the thing that's about to just absolutely grow and grow and grow …”

Join the Crescendo

The IBC underpins smooth data transfer between blockchains and I am here for it. That feeling you have when bridging funds back from an Ethereum L2 — which is akin to the desperate refrain of “Annie, are you OK?” — is eased by the elegance of IBC.

It’s not difficult to join with the many passionate developers and users of the Cosmos Interchain. You can set up a wallet or interact via MetaMask Snaps very easily, and from there it’s as easy as IBC.

Author and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

Editor Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

Starting out in crypto is hard. Until we make it seamless for everyday users, mainstream adoption will never happen. Sure, people will own bitcoin through an ETF or in their Coinbase account, but decentralized finance will not take off until we fix the fundamental flaws inherent in the system.

The funny thing is, we all know what the problems are and yet we have struggled to adequately solve them. This article will spell out what I believe needs to change in DeFi so crypto adoption can truly become mainstream.

One Wallet for Everything

When interacting with DeFi, it all starts with your digital wallet, and their ease of use isn’t getting any better. How many wallet addresses do you have? Better yet, how many Ethereum addresses do you have? This is the #1 problem right now for regular users, so imagine how hard it is for new users! Even though crypto wallets have come a long way there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to simplify how we interact with DeFi.

#1 Wallets Have One User Interface for All Chains

Wallets need to get to the point where it doesn’t matter what chain you are using. It doesn’t matter if it’s going to be only one chain in the future or many; how wallets interact with users needs to be seamless. It is still too difficult to figure out what chain to use for what dApp and where to find the right RPC to connect to the chain. The user’s experience should be simply to click one button and all the complicated stuff happens in the background.

#2 Users No Longer Bridge Assets

Bridging isn’t going to disappear, but having users do it manually can be replaced with streamlined transfer options. If Aave is giving a higher yield on the Arbitrum chain than on Avalanche, then I should be able to transfer my funds from Avalanche to Arbitrum in one user interface. The bridge still happens, but the process is seamless for users. We are tired of 'bridge shopping' to see which bridges connect to specific chains with a specific asset we have: “Oh no, you have USDC and not USDC.e, that will be an extra 1% liquidity fee to exchange it!” — this is bullshit and we all know it.

#3 No More Gas 

Competition between L1 chains and the proliferation of Layer 2 protocols has been a good thing for crypto users. Ethereum is still the worst when it comes to gas prices but eventually, upgrades to network architecture starting with EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), should drastically decrease these fees. Eventually, gas costs will be so negligible that dApps will pay gas on users’ behalf as an incentive to use their products.

#3.5 Allow Users to Use Different Tokens as Substitute for Gas

How many times have you bridged assets to a new chain only to realize you don’t have tokens to cover gas fees on the new chain? You then have to bridge the gas token in order to do anything. How about if dApps just took a small amount of the token you wanted to trade and swapped that into the gas token? This is one of the quickest ways to ease frustration for new users — in fact all users!

#4 Wallets Must Not Allow Unlimited Access to Your Tokens

There may be a reason why this practice was initially adopted but oh my has it caused more harm than good. Back in the day, when you did anything on a dApp, you had to give that dApp unlimited access to the token you wanted to use.

One example: back during DeFi summer, I was degening into all the Polygon dApps to make a quick buck. I found ‘PolyGarden’, which RugDoc initially said was safe, so I threw in a $100 worth of USDC and didn’t care if I lost it. When the pools went live, the developers switched the contracts and hard rugged everyone (aka stole everything). I did what I was supposed to and revoked the PolyGarden token contract so it couldn’t interact with my wallet anymore. However I did not revoke the USDC contract so later on, when I moved $4,000 in USDC out of a Curve pool into my wallet, it disappeared. The PolyGarden developers were executing transactions that would check the wallets they had access to for a USDC balance and would withdraw it instantly if found. Poof, $4,000 gone because I had made a mistake a few weeks prior.

Luckily, wallets are improving by auto-generating a token approval limit to the amount you are wanting to transact. But the safest practice is to still revoke contracts after use, just in case an exploit happens. This is a fix that is urgently needed before the layman is ready to jump into crypto.

Safety Mechanism for Stolen Funds

Crypto still has a major problem with assets being stolen through hacks and phishing attacks. If we want to stay with the “not your keys, not your crypto” mantra, then there needs to be a way to safeguard your funds. Whether this is through insurance funds or community raises for exploits, users need to know their crypto is safe.

Think about it, someone new to crypto types in “Aave” in Google and the first thing that pops up is “Aaave.com”. How would they know that Aave is not spelled with three a's? So they click on it and connect their wallet and poof, the money is gone. Or how about dApp exploits where all users are screwed and you hope they have a treasury to give you something back? We can’t keep saying that crypto is risky and you should have known better. Again, that is bullshit. Why would users enter a world where they can lose their money instead of throwing it in a Blackrock ETF or to Coinbase — where they at least have legal recourse to get the money back?

Wallets Are Linked to Identity and There Are No More Passwords

Let’s stop with this stupid notion that you need a seed phrase as the only backup to your crypto. No, I am not going to hammer the seed phrase into steel cards and install a fireproof safe in the backyard. Sure, this may work if the single wallet idea comes around. How about instead, we link it to your identity? To you as a person. Think WorldCoin for a second (please don’t get out your pitchforks) — they are onto something. The company scans your eye to give you a unique identity on the blockchain. Unless you lose both your eyes, this identity can’t be hacked or lost. Maybe this isn’t the long term solution, but having a digital identity that is linked to you and only you is much easier then remembering 20 passwords that are probably saved on your computer or are all the same anyway.

Meme Coins Lose Steam

Meme coins have a place in crypto, just like meme stocks have a place in the stock market by putting a value on culture. The problem is when meme coins hold valuations in the billions (DOGE and SHIB) yet don’t have utility or provide any tangible value.

It is hard for non-crypto users to take crypto seriously when DOGE is in the top ten of all crypto coins. The meme stocks GameStop and AMC went very high but eventually came down; not until meme coins similarly lose steam and market cap will crypto be taken more seriously.

Taxes

This is more for my fellow Americans but I am guessing that many people have the same problem. If you are a DeFi user, chances are that you are using dApps and chains that are not accounted for by the leading crypto tax companies. I already hate doing my taxes because the government knows everything already so why don’t they just tell me how much I owe? Crypto tax companies are getting better but it still takes hours to go over your transactions because these companies weren’t tracking new Layer 2s or the new meme token of the day. If it is a pain in the ass for people who know how to read chain explorers, then imagine how hard it would be for inexperienced people.

Are We Gonna Make It?

We are entering the start of the bull market and new chains are popping up left and right. The fixes I’ve recommended will go a long way in making it easier for new users to come into DeFi and actually see crypto’s benefits — without the steep and sometimes painful learning curve. I hope that crypto wallet companies, dApps, and chain developers are listening and making changes in time to capture new users and benefit from the bull market. Crypto and DeFi are the future; we just need to make sure we help rather than hinder early users.

Author Bio

Just Another Crypto Analyst is a crypto native writer who shares what he has learned over the years to help others. You can read more of his writing on Medium.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

For the last few years, I’ve spent the majority of my crypto life focused on the Ethereum ecosystem. Bitcoin seemed too singular in its use case as a store of value (this was long before Ordinals and BRCs), and among the hundreds of other chains available, Ethereum was an easy choice; after all, it’s the World Computer. But after four years of calling Etherea my home, I’ve decided that I really need to get out more, to explore the sun and stars. For the past few months I’ve practiced degenerative cryptoeconomics on Solana, staked my way across the Cosmos, swapped for chicken tokens on Tron, and traversed safely over to Avalanche. Suffice to say I’ve been busy, happily so. 

Below you’ll find a travel guide of sorts, a short intergalactic instructional manual for getting to Solona, Tron, Avalanche, and Cosmos onchain. To be fair, it’s often faster and less risky to use a centralized exchange for getting native tokens (the token used for transaction fees on a particular chain) across to new chains; it’s also much easier. I try to stay onchain when I can, but I’m not averse to using a CEX to send a few gas tokens to a new chain. But many of us are here, in part, to live a rewarding onchain life, one rich with new friends, experiences, and airdrops, so with some ETH, stablecoins, new wallets, and a number of confirmations, you too can become a well-traveled cryptogalactic onchain explorer! 

A Few Notes on Bridges

I have been using Allbridge Core to send funds to Solana, Tron, and Avalanche. For bridging to the Cosmos ecosystem of app chains, I like RocketX and Gravity Bridge. But bridges are novel and complex, and are frequently exploited — as we saw recently with Bungee. When bridging for the first time to a new wallet crosschain, I often send a small test transaction. These transactions can take 30 minutes or more to confirm, so some level of patience is required to ensure you’re all set to properly launch to other celestial bodies. 

Crosschain bridges work best when you transfer stablecoins, in fact Allbridge requires it. Allbridge is great because you can set it to swap a small portion of your funds for the native chain’s token (there’s a slider bar on the dApp called ‘Extra Gas’ — you may need to bridge a few times to get enough initial gas), which will enable you to use the network when bridging is complete. Gravity Bridge doesn’t offer this feature and limits the tokens to a few stablecoins and ETH — not helpful for readiness to transact on a new network. Fortunately, RocketX enables swapping of many popular tokens, and it is what I use for crosschain native-token swapping when using a new network for the first time.

That said, for many people it probably makes practical sense to just use CEXs to send native tokens to new chains — it’s just simpler, more secure, and faster. I do it both ways, and don’t imagine a world anytime soon where I can completely abstain from CEX forever. 

As a final note on wallet hygiene, it’s always best to set the token approval limit to only the amount you are bridging and to revoke these approvals after bridging either at revoke.cash or Etherscan. Doing so will help to ensure you reduce the risk of using this convenient technology. 

Heading for the Sun

The run-up of SOL these past six months has been epic, and has brought attention back to Solana following the FTX fiasco in late 2022. Far from being the death many predicted for Solana, its token has done an easy 10x+ since post-FTX lows, and it hosts the most lively, most degenerate memecoin market of any chain. 

Bridging funds to Solana (and crosschain in general) is as simple as bridging to any L2, with one catch. Whereas for an L2 your Ethereum address and L2 address are the same, your crosschain wallet will have a different address (public key). Before bridging, you’ll need to set up a Solana-compatible wallet, so check out either Phantom or Solflare. 

Once there, I tend to use Raydium for swapping, and Magic Eden is the most popular NFT marketplace. Solscan is the main block explorer on Solana, but it has limited functionality compared to Etherscan. Recently, however, Solscan was acquired by Etherscan, so expect the block explorer to be upgraded in the near future. 

Traversing a New Mountain

The L1 Avalanche doesn’t get a lot of attention compared to its EVM-compatible L2 cousins, but the network has been producing blocks since 2020 and has some of the most ardent supporters in crypto. Unlike with many other chains, there’s no need to create a new wallet, since Avalanche’s EVM-friendliness enables users to simply add the network in an Ethereum wallet’s network settings or by visiting chainlist.org. 

Trader Joe is the main DEX on Avalanche, while Joepegs is a popular NFT marketplace. Since the network is EVM compatible, you’ll find many popular Ethereum-native protocols on Avalanche, including Aave, Curve, and 1inch Network.

A New Sun Births a Star

A Sun of a different kind founded the TRON Network in 2017, and seven years later the blockchain regularly hosts more stablecoin transactions than any other network. As with Solana and Avalanche, you can choose to use Allbridge or RocketX to bridge funds to TRON, but if it’s your first time using the network, RocketX will allow you to swap for TRX, TRON’s native token. FYI, the first time I bridged using Allbridge I needed three separate transactions to acquire enough TRX to swap tokens. 

TronLink is the primary wallet for TRON, while SunSwap is a popular DEX. Notably, and unlike Solana, Avalanche, and various Cosmos app chains, tokens on TRON are not listed by Dex Screener, so you’ll need to use avedex.cc to view statistics and charts. 

Into the Cosmos

Of all the new places I’ve visited these past few months, none have been more surprising than my trips around the Cosmos network. Native tokens are staked, and protocol governance is done via in-wallet voting delegation to network validators. Excitingly, there’s a clear effort to decentralize the network through regular prompts to delegate voting power to minority validators. That’s just awesome. The number of app chains grows daily, burgeoning with DEXs, liquid staking protocols, options/perpetual protocols, and all the rest. If you can do it on Ethereum, you’ll find an analogous app chain within Cosmos.

Keplr and Leap are the two most popular Cosmos wallets. For me, the important distinction is that unlike Keplr, Leap enables you to create multiple wallets for each app chain, while Keplr limits you to one wallet per chain. In that sense, Leap is more like MetaMask or other popular Ethereum wallets. 

Many of the trendiest tokens of the last six months, including TIA (Celestia), INJ (Injective), SEI (Sei Network) are found within Cosmos, and it’s been well-reported that TIA stakers in particular have been the beneficiaries of other airdrops.

I particularly like Osmosis DEX, and would recommend beginning your Cosmos journey there by using RocketX to bridge some OSMO to the app chain. From there, you can swap tokens or explore other dApps — an easy landing zone on a faraway planet. 

Being at Home When Away

Leaving home is hard, and even more so when you’ve become comfortable within the familiar confines of Ethereum. But the cryptoverse is vast, nearly infinite in some ways, and the innate human need to explore easily transcends fiat space and finds a ready partner in crypto’s vast frontier.

As with all new adventures, make sure you have the proper supplies and a bit of extra time on your hands, as using new technology in distant galaxies requires patience and perseverance. But with this trusty guide and a bit of stardust by your side, you’ll be more than equipped to confidently explore where few Ethereans have gone before.

Author Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer and cofounder of IndyPen CryptoMedia. He loves people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, DAOs are pioneering governance models for new types of organizations and communities. The recent Tally How To DAO conference in Istanbul contributed to this evolution, bringing together thought leaders to discuss the impact and potential of token voting.

Token voting is a flexible solution that enables a DAO to design the governance system that works best for its circumstances. There are several concepts to consider, such as "one token, one vote", whereby each community member's voting power is corresponds with their token holding, or "one person, one vote", which is similar to traditional national or state governance. Alternatively, these options can be combined with other strategies, such as limiting token issuance or requiring token holders to stake. In the NounsDAO, for example, members can purchase only one token per day, meaning there is no open market for governance tokens. With so many different combinations and permutations, several companies such as Bankless Consulting and Metagov specialize in governance research, design, and implementation to help DAOs discover the right governance system for them.

Embracing a New Governance Paradigm

The Tally How To DAO Istanbul conference emphasized token voting as a cornerstone of modern DAO governance. CoolHorseGirl from Tally — a market leading front-end solution for onchain governance — delivered a keynote with a comprehensive overview of token voting, exploring its various forms and underlying principles. She highlighted how token voting aligns the incentives of all stakeholders involved in a DAO, ensuring that governance decisions reflect the collective will and long-term interests of the community.

In terms of economic aspects, she pointed out a variety of methods to prevent governance from being economically influenced, such as using non-transferable tokens, as practiced by SafeDAO. Another approach involves vesting contracts that allow contributors to vote only with vested (locked) tokens, thus ensuring their long-term interest in the DAO's success. The adaptability of token voting is underscored by its compatibility with established token standards like ERC-20 and ERC-721, enhancing its scalability and integration into diverse blockchain infrastructures. Adoption of these standards ensures that the infrastructure is in place and we can innovate on top of it. This is similar to the way Amazon has been able to succeed by leveraging the existing infrastructure of internet and road networks to provide outstanding service.

The significance of a robust go-to-market strategy, especially in challenging market conditions, was another focal point. CoolHorseGirl believes token voting is a powerful tool to amplify project visibility and community engagement, and underpins the success of numerous well-known projects, such as ArbitrumDAO, Uniswap, and Gitcoin. However, she also highlighted the challenges inherent in token voting systems; such as susceptibility to economic attacks, similar to hostile takeovers, when one actor with deep pockets can buy enough voting power to become the sole decision maker for the whole DAO; and the need for equitable token distribution. Solutions like conviction voting were discussed as a means to mitigate these issues, ensuring that token voting remains a transparent and verifiable method for community engagement — but that's not the only solution. The development of governance is ongoing, and the industry is evolving daily.

Another pioneer in the voting space is DEXE DAO Studio. Recently, it launched a new product that enables any DAO to find the token-voting model that suits their needs. They address several aspects of the voting lifecycle: first, they remediate some fundamental problems such as the principal-agent dilemma and systemic inefficiencies such as delayed decision making, non-existent workstream coordination, and lack of stakeholder engagement. Then, they find the right incentive model to push the DAO forward.

To learn more about how they are solving some of the main DAO drawbacks you can listen to this recording featuring Dmitryi, the co-founder of DEXE.

During the subsequent panel discussions at the conference, experts like Disruption Joe, Joshua Tan, and Mashal Waqar delved deeper into the intricacies of token voting. They addressed the critical concern of voter apathy — a persistent problem in governance systems. One cause of apathy is the need for more incentives, which seems fairly straightforward. However a more nuanced view is that while there might be little voting onchain, there could be discussion on the social consensus layers which can generate sufficient engagement given the right incentives. Therefore, the key to success is figuring out how to reflect the community’s will onchain, in a user-friendly manner. Joshua also pointed out that the act of ‘not voting’ as a way to stay credibly neutral is a reasonable approach to avoid conflicts of interest, which are present everywhere.

Next, Disruption Joe proposed innovative solutions to distribute decision-making power more broadly, thereby diluting conflicts of interest and ensuring a more neutral and credible governance process. Examples like RetroPGF at Optimism were cited, where the widespread distribution of decision-making authority minimizes the impact of individuals’ conflict of interest.

The conference concluded with the notion that token voting is not just a governance mechanism but a gateway to a more inclusive, transparent, and agile form of community-driven decision making. The journey ahead for DAOs and token voting is filled with opportunities for innovation and growth, promising a better future for decentralized governance.

Challenges and Pathways to Improvement

Addressing the challenges associated with token voting was a critical aspect of the How To DAO conference. Many discussions revolved around navigating the risks of economic manipulations — such as vote buying — and the intricacies involved in token distribution and locking periods.

Experts at the conference, including Jana from the Rari Foundation, presented insights into their approaches to governance. RariDAO has adopted a delegate system where some community members act akin to politicians, creating their brand and presenting their vision and work to the community. The system allows delegates to earn more token allocation based on metrics of their success and reputation within the community, directly tying their decision-making power to community interests and their performance. This method creates a dynamic where delegates are incentivized to stay true to the community's values and interests. If they fail to align with the community or perform poorly, they risk losing delegated tokens and their influence within the DAO. According to Jana, this approach fosters a governance model that is responsive, accountable, and deeply rooted in community engagement.

On the other hand, Pocket Network, represented by Adz, has taken a different approach to reputation-based governance. Understanding the technical complexity of the project, Pocket Network limits token distribution to a select group of individuals who possess the necessary technical insight and understanding of the project. This strategy ensures that decision making is in the hands of those who are best qualified. While maintaining a sufficiently large group to keep the organization decentralized, Pocket Network accentuates the importance of informed and knowledgeable governance, ensuring that those with decision-making power are fully equipped to contribute effectively to the protocol's growth and success.

These two examples — the Rari Foundation and Pocket Network — highlight the diversity and adaptability of reputation-based governance models for DAOs. While different in their execution, both approaches underscore the importance of aligning governance mechanisms with the unique needs and challenges of each DAO. As these models are put into practice and continue to evolve, they provide valuable insights into the potential of tailored governance systems in fostering effective, responsive, and community-aligned decision making in DAOs.

Unfolding the Potential of Token Voting

As the How To DAO conference concluded, it left us optimistic about the future of decentralized governance — particularly through the lens of token voting. The unanimous sentiment was that there’s a need for continuous innovation and adaptation in the realm of token-voting practices. DAOs are venturing into new, uncharted territories, and the flexibility and diversity offered by token-based voting methods are essential in navigating the unique challenges and opportunities of decentralized governance. This journey forward is marked by a collective eagerness to explore, experiment, and refine governance models, pointing towards a vibrant and dynamic future for DAOs and their communities.

As the author of this piece, I firmly believe in the enduring relevance of token-based voting, primarily due to its inherent adaptability. It provides customized governance solutions that can adapt to the unique requirements of each entity. This flexibility is essential to meet the diverse needs of various organizations today, which range in type and size. Moreover, in the realm of internet-native organizations, there's an inherent quality of being borderless from inception and possessing the ability to scale swiftly. In this varied landscape, the nimbleness of token voting is indispensable.

Furthermore, token voting empowers individuals by giving them a choice to be involved: imagine working at a company like OpenAI and being asked for your preference on major company decisions. Engaging employees and contributors in the process, rather than enacting decisions from the top, transforms the way organizations operate. A great example is MakerDAO; despite the drama surrounding some recent proposals, the decisions reflected the will of token holders, which resulted in them being accepted and respected by all parties involved. This nonviolent approach to governance, where everyone gets to be involved in the decision-making process, can eliminate the need for drastic measures like strikes or petitions. It represents a more democratic way of steering an organization, where everyone's voice is heard and valued.

In a world that longs for openness and harmony, token voting emerges as a tool and a model pathway to more democratic, transparent, and harmonious organizational governance. It is an avenue that respects the opinions of its stakeholders, making governance a collective, participatory journey. As we continue to navigate the ever-changing landscape of DAOs and decentralized systems, the role of token voting in designing more engaged, peaceful, and inclusive systems cannot be overstated — it’s a beacon of hope and a testament to the power of collective decision making in shaping the future of organizations and communities alike.

Next Steps

If you want to learn more about token voting, DAOs, and the web3 ecosystem, check out our next How To DAO event in Denver on February 28, 2024. Happening during ETHDenver, it will be our biggest event so far, with four talk tracks and networking opportunities to accommodate anyone from crypto newcomers to seasoned experts. We hope to see you there!

Author Bio

Puncar is passionate about supporting the web3 ecosystem through designing the right incentives, tokenomics, and governance structures.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus communicating this knowledge to others via IndyPen CryptoMedia.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

IndyPen CryptoMedia is open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article for consideration!

You may have noticed that Bankless Publishing stopped shipping in late November. If you followed Bankless Publishing on X, you would have recently seen this post:

IndyPen CryptoMedia

@IndyPenMedia

gm gm Bankless Publishing followers! As you can see, the name and handle of this profile, formerly Bankless Publishing, is now IndyPen CryptoMedia. Recent developments between BanklessDAO and BanklessHQ demonstrated that we would need BanklessHQ’s permission to continue producing…

61

4:45 AM • Jan 5, 2024

The text in full:

gm gm Bankless Publishing followers!
As you can see, the name and handle of this profile, formerly Bankless Publishing, is now IndyPen CryptoMedia. Recent developments between BanklessDAO and BanklessHQ demonstrated that we would need BanklessHQ’s permission to continue producing content under the Bankless Publishing name.
Part of what was so exciting about being a project associated with BanklessDAO was the idea that a successful company would enable others to use its brand as a banner for a permissionless global movement centered on self sovereignty. However, after two years of the 'headless brand' experiment, BanklessHQ has decided that the brand does in fact have a head, and access to it must now be controlled.
Instead of working within this unmanageable paradox, we (trewkat and Hiro Kennelly) have decided to move forward as IndyPen CryptoMedia and will no longer be publishing in association with BanklessDAO, even though we still strongly align with bankless values.
We hope you will stay with us as we develop IndyPen to bring you creative and informative content from a variety of authors immersed in different areas of this great new world we call the cryptoverse. Visit http://indypen.xyz to see all previous BP content and look out for our first new article set to ship soon!

And that's what we're about to do: ship our first article. It's about token voting — a recap of presentations from the recent How To DAO event during ETH Istanbul.

We hope you choose to continue to receive content from IndyPen, but if you wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please use the 'Unsubscribe' link at the bottom of this email.

See you in the shipping lanes soon!

Hiro & trewkat

Protocols that focus on DID, or Decentralized Identity, have been around for years, but many are still not known outside of their niche communities. That’s gradually changing, and programs like Gitcoin Grants help spread awareness. GG Round 19 is in full swing, and to aid you in your donation journey, we shipped a thread on how to boost your Gitcoin Passport score earlier this week. 

Now let’s take a look at some of the lesser-known DID projects involved with Gitcoin Passport which could help you to maximize your Unique Humanity Score: a 0–100 scale developed to measure our uniqueness as a human onchain. The higher the score, the more matching funds the projects you donate to will receive. What DID we do to get our score higher? Read on frens.

Idena

Founded in 2019, Idena is a blockchain with Sybil resistance built into the block validation system. Idena pioneered Proof-of-Person, which enables anonymous proof of uniqueness for each network participant; it “does not require any personal data sharing, does not reveal a person’s identity, and does not need a third-party identification center.”

To do this, Idena uses what it calls ‘synchronous validation sessions’ where prior validators and new initiates attend a ‘checkpoint ritual’ where people prove their personhood by synchronously solving timed puzzles which are hard for bots but simple for humans. The result of this is that each blockchain node is linked to a person.

Because of the built in Sybil resistance, you can get nearly 10 points added to your Gitcoin Passport score if you are an Idena validator.

Civic

Civic is the creator of the Civic Pass, an onchain identity management tool. Holders of a wallet-bound Civic Pass are required to go through a multi-step verification process, which can include proof of uniqueness, liveliness, reliance on ID documents, and location.

Unlike with Idena, you will be required to record a short video-selfie to prove uniqueness. After completing that step and a cute CAPTCHA that asks you if you have what is commonly referred to as a soul, you’ll be prompted to pay a small admin fee and gas fees for minting the pass.

You’ll want to do all three except for ID Verification, which Gitcoin doesn’t take into account for Stamp scoring. It took me 10 minutes (and two selfies!) to get my Civic Pass by completing Uniqueness, Liveness, and CAPTCHA verification, and I added six more points to my Passport score!

Holonym

A year-old project, Holonym is a provider of Sybil-resistance solutions built using ZK-SNARKS. Through the use of zero-knowledge proofs, Holonym seeks to keep private information private while allowing protocols to verify the uniqueness of the person behind the wallet address. Holonym accomplishes this because ZK-SNARKS enable the proving of the truth of a statement without needing to know the underlying information which generated the statement.

With Holonym, users can prove a variety of facts that help to demonstrate identity required for compliance, whether KYC, Sybil-resistant DAO voting, or receiving airdrops. Unlike with Civic Pass, you do need to provide a government-issued ID to earn this Stamp.

Phi

Grab your 8-bit goggles, boots, and sword, because Phi is a protocol built for questing! The platform hosts third-party campaigns, but also has native quests that encourage you to go explore the different corners of web3. They are even helping the world go bankless!!

In return for exploring and completing tasks, you’ll be rewarded with experience points (EXP). These points are what you need to boost your Gitcoin Passport score. So get questing, and then come back to Gitcoin Passport to update your score. Who says Sybil resistance can’t be fun!

Getting Philately With It

Philately is the term used for studying and collecting stamps, and with Gitcoin Grants Round 19 upon us, there’s no better time to get out your passport and start stamping. You’ll be ensuring you maximize your donation matching while exploring the world of protocols intent on making web3 a fairer, more democratic place. We don’t always think about decentralized identity as we go about our web3 life, and with protocols designed to keep identity in the background, hopefully we won’t have to.

Author and Designer Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and shipper at Bankless Publishing, builder at BanklessDAO and DAOpunks, and a lover of people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics.

Editor Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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The World Of Web3 by Azeem Khan

Picture this: you walk into a party — the music is pumping and people are laughing, chatting, and even dancing on the tables. It’s pretty easy to tell that this is a party many people would want to attend, right? Conversely, if you walk in and people are shoving past you to leave — muttering about how boring the hosts are, you might well be tempted to leave too and take your party platter home with you.

What you’re doing in this situation is ‘reading the room’ — you are taking into account a number of factors to make an informed prediction about the prevailing sentiment, or ‘vibe’. This could always turn out to be wrong, of course, but it gives you something to base your decision on. 

The Fear and Greed Index

This is essentially what the financial market tool known as the Fear and Greed Index is all about. This tool aggregates a variety of market indicators to come up with a number between 0 and 100 and a corresponding classification which ranges from Extreme Fear through Fear, Neutral, and Greed to Extreme Greed. The idea is that bringing together several indicative trends into one sentiment indicator gives investors a sense of which way the market is heading.

Unlike the party analogy though, it’s generally agreed that when overall sentiment is positive — and people are greedy — this is a better time to exit the market (sell), or at least to hold off buying. Likewise, when sentiment is showing that the market is fearful, this can be the best time to enter a trading position. It’s akin to choosing the quiet party so you get the best shot at the snacks table. TradFi guru Warren Buffet famously noted that it’s strategic for investors “to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful” and the Fear and Greed Index is a well-known tool in stock market investing.

The concept of the Fear and Greed Index has been applied to cryptocurrency markets too, and there are a few different ones you can follow depending on your preferences. My first exposure was to the two X accounts — the Ethereum Fear and Greed Index and the Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index. From the visual style, I believe they’re run by the same entity but there is no information available about the Ethereum data. The corresponding Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index webpage has more information about the sources used and also offers a .csv download of historical data, which some investors — like Rhett Reisman — use to inform a dollar-cost-averaging strategy or other buy/sell decisions.

Even if you’re not ready to invest in cryptocurrency, the Fear and Greed Index is a great way to stay informed about market sentiment and how this tracks against price movements and long-term cycles.

Other providers of Fear and Greed Indices are the Crypto Fear and Greed Index (CFGI) which tracks 40 different cryptocurrencies and enables you to set alerts, and Milk Road has one for bitcoin.

Screenshot from Crypto Fear and Greed Index — Why use it? CFGI on YouTube

Calculating the Fear and Greed Index

The specific methodology might vary slightly between different providers of the index, but here are some common components:

1. Volatility Index
   Cryptocurrency price volatility is often associated with fear and uncertainty. Higher volatility is considered a sign of fear, while lower volatility may indicate complacency or greed.

2. Market Momentum
   Momentum indicators assess the strength and direction of recent price movements. Strong upward momentum may be associated with greed, while a sharp decline may signal fear.

3. Social Media Sentiment
   Some indices include sentiment analysis of social media platforms, forums, and news articles related to cryptocurrencies. Positive sentiment may indicate greed, while negative sentiment may suggest fear.

4. Google Trends
   The popularity of cryptocurrency-related searches on Google can be used as a sentiment indicator. A surge in searches may be linked to greed, while a decline may be associated with fear.

5. Market Dominance
   The market dominance of bitcoin compared to other cryptocurrencies is sometimes considered. An increasing dominance of bitcoin may be associated with fear, as investors might be moving towards perceived safer assets, while decreasing dominance could be linked to greed.

6. Put/Call Ratio
   Similar to traditional markets, the put/call ratio in the options market for cryptocurrencies can be an indicator of fear or greed. A higher ratio of put options to call options might suggest fear, as investors may be buying more puts for protection.

7. Trading Volume
   Unusually high or low trading volumes can be indicative of market sentiment. High trading volume may be associated with fear or greed, depending on the context.

8. Price Deviation from Moving Averages
   Deviation of cryptocurrency prices from their moving averages can be considered. Prices significantly above moving averages might signal greed, while prices below may suggest fear.

Once these indicators are collected, they are typically normalized and weighted to create an overall index score which is mapped onto the scale.

Source: Ethereum Fear and Greed Index on X

Tracking Crypto Price Against the Fear and Greed Index

While the Ethereum Fear and Greed Index is not a direct reflection of the ETH price, you can see from my (novice) chart below that the index seems to correlate with price movements, at least during the period October 10 to November 9, 2023.

In this chart, the change in ETH price (in USD) is shown by the blue line (left axis), and the level of the Fear and Greed Index is shown by the columns and measured by the right axis. The change from neutral to greed is shown by the transition from yellow to green.

Chart produced using data from Ethereum Fear and Greed Index on X

There may be a visual correlation between the recent Ethereum Fear and Greed Index and ETH price, but correlation does not equal causation. Sentiment and prices are influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including market fundamentals, news events, regulatory developments, and macroeconomic trends. As with any metrics, especially subjective measures like the Fear and Greed Index, traders and investors should use several tools rather than basing decisions on one piece of information.

Using the Fear and Greed Index to Inform Trading

Having said that, given the unique characteristics of the crypto space where sentiment can play a significant role in price movements, the index can be interesting to watch. Some ways that the index could inform trading are:

1. Market Timing
   If the index indicates extreme greed, it may signal a time to exercise caution or consider taking profits. Conversely, extreme fear may indicate overselling, suggesting a potential buying opportunity.

2. Risk Management
   High levels of greed may indicate a potential bubble or euphoria, prompting investors to be more cautious and consider adjusting their risk exposure.

3. Confirmation of Trends
   If there is a strong uptrend in a cryptocurrency, but the Fear and Greed Index shows extreme greed, it might suggest that the trend is becoming overextended and a correction could be imminent.

4. Long-Term Investment Signals
   While the index is often used for short-term trading decisions, it can also provide insights for long-term investors, as per the dollar-cost-averaging example provided earlier.

Even if you’re not ready to invest in cryptocurrency, the Fear and Greed Index is a great way to stay informed about market sentiment and how this tracks against price movements and long-term cycles. 

Author and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

Editor Bio

Kornekt is a writer, editor, and content manager at Bankless Publishing. He is deeply fascinated about crypto, web3, and blockchain technology.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always accepting submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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After reading and shipping more than 200 articles over the last couple of years, the Bankless Publishing team decided we would each pick out a few favorites. The seven featured here are my choices — articles that impressed me because they guide the reader towards something new. The through line in particular, is our raison d’etre at BP, they are pieces that educate well.

They’re in no particular order, but we all love a countdown so here goes:

7. Tokenomics 101: Bitcoin & Ethereum

This classic from Florian Strauf is one of the most viewed pieces on our website to date. In his series of tokenomics pieces, Strauf covered Thor Chain, Terra, Kilt Protocol, and BanklessDAO… but before he did all that he wrote a 101 crash course on Bitcoin and Ethereum. I can’t think of a better explainer to send to a person who has never heard of cryptocurrency or tokenomics.

“Like a central bank applying monetary policy to control its currency, tokenomics applies policies to cryptocurrencies. These policies are the core of a currency. Without carefully thinking through the rules, the currency is likely to fail. The rules of tokenomics are implemented through code and are quite difficult to alter as they require agreement from many network participants.”

This piece is complete with charts and graphs and all the stats you need to get the skinny on bitcoin and ether. It discusses bitcoin’s supply issuance, the hard cap of 21M, and its valuation, then rolls through Ethereum’s progress towards proof-of-stake consensus. Although this article pre-dates The Merge, in fact because it does, it’s a great read.

If you’re wondering where and how to teach your friend about cryptocurrency, hit ’em with Tokenomics 101: Bitcoin & Ethereum.

6. Friend.Tech is Saving Twitter

What’s amazing about this piece isn’t just that BP did an interview with one of the biggest influencers on Friend.Tech (Captain Levi), but it is our exploration of the technology itself as it was only days following the launch. This piece is a historical record of the first time someone essentially put Twitter onchain and charged eth to follow people.

“No content creator has to sell bullshit merch anymore. No content creator has to accept bullshit ads and sponsors who are only interested in monetizing their fan base. Every content creator can just obsess over the content they loved to create in the first place and your fans will literally fight for you.

If I did it in five days, you can do it too. Let’s save Twitter together, starting with obsessing on content.”

Who knows if this particular attempt will turn out to be the Facebook or the MySpace of social-fi, but either way we’re glad we were at the cutting edge to document it. Tip of the hat to my colleague at BP, Hiro Kennelly, who had the fortitude (and the ETH) to dive into that novelty world, kick around, and ask questions, and met Levi in the process.

Get savvy on Friend.Tech and maybe make some ether while you’re at it.

5. The Ultimate NFT Red Flag Checklist

When hella people were getting dunked on, wash-traded, and scammed out of their valuable ETH in the name of NFTs, it was time for BP to compile the classic signs to a $hitty NFT project. Bankless Fam fave Kalex (who went on to work for HQ) knocked this one out and we were more than happy to ship it. It contains bangers like “if you don’t like the art, don’t buy it” (you’d think that’d be a no brainer but it isn’t) and advises readers to be wary of any project that has a celebrity as its primary promoter. This was pre-Kim-Kardashian-endorsing-EthereumMax. Way pre, like half a year earlier.

“When reviewing roadmaps, you should be asking yourself whether the promises made are realistic. If a promise seems ambitious and the project seems to be breaking new ground, be careful. You should vet the team to see if they’re able to make good on those promises. If they seem like they’re biting off more than they can chew, it’s time to start asking questions on Discord and/or Twitter.”

Bankless Publishing had your back before you even knew it! The fact that we were already safeguarding our readership against the onslaught of froth in a bull market warms our hearts.

Be sure and peruse this dope NFT Safety Checklist by Kalex.

4. The Byzantine Generals Problem, 51% Attacks, and Proof-of-Work

This piece is right on the money (pun intended) because it explains the origins of the proof-of-work consensus model that Bitcoin operates with. Bankless Publishing author Jake and Stake knocked it out of the park with a breakdown of the well-known “Byzantine Generals Problem”.

Here’s an illustration: suppose several Byzantine Generals are preparing to attack a city. Each General’s army is located at various points around the city, distant from the others, and has their own resources and supply lines… if some Generals attack and others do not, they will be defeated. To survive, they must attack together or retreat together.

Not many people at BanklessDAO are that into bitcoin, and that’s okay, but as Bankless Publishing it is our duty to look at the OG cryptocurrency and give credit where credit is due. This piece very much does that and shows that we weren’t just thinking about the next ERC-20 token launch in Q1 of 2023.

Take a moment to catch up on the origins of Bitcoin, since you probably haven’t even read the whitepaper, anon.

3. What’s Behind The Backing of Stablecoins?

This piece is so great because it gets at the heart of what Bankless Publishing wants to do best: educate. Sure in one sentence you can say, “Stablecoins are backed by dollars.” But whose dollars? Where? How is it enforced? Why do they lose their peg? All of these questions and more are answered in this early piece shipped by BP.

In countries with high inflation or uncertain economic conditions, stablecoins can be a way to store money in a less inflationary and safer way. In many such countries, it’s difficult to get real USD without a US bank account. A stablecoin might be a good alternative here.

It was Q4 2021 and we were all about that education. As of today stablecoins hold down more than 100B of the total crypto market cap; that’s about ten percent. Stable coins are integral for securing positions outside of crypto while remaining liquid to get back in the market. Plus, these days Coinbase will give you 5% year over year just to hodl. Sure beats a CD or a savings account.

Get educated on the early days of stablecoins in this piece by Florian Strauf.

2. 4 Simple Steps on How to Join a DAO

Also one of our top ten most read articles, this piece’s title says it all. We’re all about teaching you how to get into the world of web3 and Samantha Marin did just that in this article.

When you join a DAO, the first thing you should assess is the vibe. DAOs are all about community. It’s the people that make DAOs such a wonderful place to work. Unlike a traditional job, there are very few switching costs with hopping from one DAO to another, so be sure to find a place where you fit in with your peers and reflects the values that you hold.

What’s so great about it is this encapsulates a time and place when there was a particular fervor around DAOs. Bankless Publishing was (and still is) on a mission to get the important details out to all of the eager anons.

Take a trip down memory lane and cruise through Samantha’s work on DAO’ing up!

1. The Essential Web3 Glossary

This one was a no-brainer. In the words of Terence McKenna, “New words create new worlds.” Web3 has most definitely generated a new lexicon and when beejorama joined our Writers Cohort and produced this glossary, we knew we wanted to share it far and wide.

FOMO: Fear of Missing Out, a form of anxiety about missing opportunities.

FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, a strategy to influence perception.

GM: Good Morning, often used in crypto social media, usually expressed in lowercase.

GWEI: A unit of gas price on the Ethereum network.

GUI: Graphical User Interface, a visual way to interact with software.

HODL: Hold On for Dear Life, advice to not sell assets during market volatility.

The OED adds between 500–2000 new words per year. Bankless Publishing has you covered until this batch finally makes its way into the established vernacular.

Brush up on your crypto essentials in this fantastic piece about web3 chatter.

The Last Word

The last word is yours. These are just some of the pieces that I believe demonstrate the ethos, attitude, and goals of Bankless Publishing, but which ones are your favorites? We’re proud to be serving up the best in web3 to our amazing audience day in and day out and we’d love to hear from you on X or see you in the BanklessDAO Discord.

We’ve shipped over 200+ articles to date on our website, and that doesn’t even include our Substack newsletters. There is talk of us moving our entire trove of published works onchain with our friends at paragraph.xyz — we’ll keep you tuned in on that as it develops.

Author Bio

Frank America is an author, musician, and comedian. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Rug News, and a Content Manager/Staff Writer at Bankless Publishing.

Edito & Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

More Like This

Building High Value in Web3 Beyond the Hype by Sabeen Ali

Counting on a New Era for Bitcoin; An Interview withe Leonidas by Tigi76

Building The Future Together in Web3 Communities by Boluwatife

Web3 is more than just a technological revolution, it’s a socio-economic movement that has the potential to decentralize prosperity and create value for all. It promises to redistribute wealth and opportunity, championing participation, collaboration, and collective ownership in a way traditional systems have failed to do.

This vision of web3 is about creating a balanced ecosystem where value is generated and shared equitably, benefiting a broader spectrum of society. Yet, there is a large group of people who see web3 as an opportunity for making quick profits through token trading, and/or exploiting the proof-of-stake (POS) consensus mechanism. I call these people ‘POS Pirates’.

POS Pirates are characterized by their relentless pursuit of short-term gains in web3; their primary focus is to accumulate as many tokens as possible, often ignoring the underlying value or potential of the projects they invest in. They thrive on exploiting the collective excitement about wanting to propel a decentralized world.

In the context of web3’s future, it is crucial to distinguish between hype and high value. Hype, predominantly fueled by speculation and short-term profit motives, is transient and often misleading. In contrast, high value is anchored in the creation of enduring impact  —  in fostering sustainable growth and genuinely contributing to the decentralization and democratization of wealth and opportunities.

As the web3 space evolves, it’s vital to remain vigilant against these POS Pirates and their short-sighted pursuits, focusing instead on nurturing initiatives that contribute positively to the overarching vision of a decentralized, equitable digital future.

In the realm of web3, the paradigm of value creation and distribution undergoes a fundamental shift. Unlike traditional centralized systems where value is accumulated by a select few, web3 ensures that value is disseminated among the users who actively contribute to and engage with the network. In this landscape, every contribution is valued, whether it is recognized through token incentives or other forms of acknowledgment.

Developers in this space are more than just creators; they assume the role of visionaries shaping a new digital environment. They are tasked with the responsibility and opportunity to build an internet experience that is open, transparent, and fundamentally fairer. Web3, therefore, represents not just a technological evolution but a cultural and economic revolution in how we interact with and contribute to the digital world.

Such a shift requires a collective mindset that values cooperation, collaboration, and a willingness to think beyond individual gain. To create high value as a developer amidst the hype-driven web3 market, here are some best practices that I have observed through my career:

1. Focus on Real Issues
   Developers should prioritize uncovering authentic issues — user or business pain points — rather than pursuing fleeting trends or immediate profits. Tackling real-world challenges enables the creation of enduring and impactful solutions. Graham Wallas, in The Art of Thought, presents a four-stage creative process, widely cited in idea generation and creativity discussions. This model comprises Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification stages. Employing this process, or similar frameworks, aids in effectively pinpointing and addressing problems and their solutions.
   

2. Focus on Creating Value
   In the Forbes article, 14 Strategies To Balance Profits And Customer Satisfaction the author states, “the goal of every business is to make a profit, but sometimes in the quest for higher earnings, the focus on customer satisfaction may be overlooked.” Instead of creating rapid but superficial applications, prioritize the development of products that are dependable, scalable, and durable. Such an approach fosters sustainable growth, as customers value and appreciate products that offer consistent and long-term value.
   

3. Prioritize User Experience
   High-value products prioritize the overall user experience. Strive for intuitive, user-friendly interfaces that enhance productivity and deliver value seamlessly. By focusing on user needs and feedback, developers can create solutions that truly meet user requirements.
   

4. Emphasize Long-Term Benefits
   Instead of merely promoting short-term gains, developers should communicate the long-term benefits and value of their products. It is important to highlight the potential for growth, cost savings, increased efficiency, and the overall positive impact that users can expect by using the product. This approach aligns with insights from the Harvard Business Review article, Why Build in Web3” which notes, ‘building on an interoperable infrastructure layer makes it easy for platforms to plug into broader content networks, thereby expanding the scale and types of value they can provide their users.” This underscores the significance of focusing on sustainable, long-term value creation in product development.
   

5. Establish Trust and Reliability
   In a market driven by speculation, building trust with users is crucial for sustainable growth. Provide regular updates, bug fixes, and improvements to ensure that your product remains reliable and trustworthy. In my 2014 LinkedIn article titled The Whole Developer, I emphasized the duty of social responsibility, writing that developers are responsible for acting ethically and compassionately, not only within their teams but also across the broader community. This approach is just as applicable as we navigate web3 and will help in building trust and reliability in a market that has suffered reputational damage. Engage in open communication channels to address user concerns and foster a strong connection.
   

6. Foster Partnerships and Collaborations
   Develop high-value products by seeking partnerships and collaborations that align with your goals. By combining expertise, resources, and shared vision, developers can create synergies that enhance the value of their products. Building a strong network within the industry can lead to sustainable growth and impactful solutions.
   

7. Continuously Adapt and Innovate
   To stay ahead of the hype-driven market, developers must continuously adapt and innovate. Keep an eye on emerging technologies, industry trends, and changing user needs. By staying agile and flexible, developers can ensure their products remain valuable and meet the evolving demands of the market. 

The journey through the web3 landscape is not just about coding or creating; it’s about evolving as a developer and as a person. It’s about being a visionary in a digital world that is constantly changing and growing. As developers, it’s our responsibility to focus on real issues, create value, and prioritize user experience.

We must emphasize long-term benefits over short-term gains, establish trust and reliability, and foster partnerships and collaborations. But it’s not all serious business; innovation can be seriously fun!

Let’s be the developers who not only write lines of code but also write new chapters in the story of digital innovation.

Here’s to creating a web3 world that’s not just about the technology, but about the people behind it — a world where every developer is not just a coder, but a creator of change, a builder of dreams, and a collaborator in our decentralized, equitable future.

Author Bio

Sabeen Ali is an accomplished web3 leader and the Global Head of Developer and Community Experience at ConsenSys, where she oversees a multidisciplinary team focused on building a robust web3 community and developer engagement through initiatives like hackathons and educational programs. She boasts a rich history of partnership with Fortune 500 companies and international organizations, leveraging her expertise to enhance their brand engagement with the developer community, and has developed a network of over 250,000 engineers worldwide. With a Master’s in Organizational Development and a strong commitment to leveraging web3 for social good, Sabeen combines her experience in change management with a passion for empowering developers in the evolving blockchain ecosystem.

Editor and Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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In today’s digital era, where online education and remote work have become the norm, the importance of in-person events often gets overlooked. However, these gatherings foster innovation and community building and serve as highly effective educational experiences. The ‘How To DAO’ (H2D) initiative is at the heart of this movement, aiming to educate and connect people in the ever-evolving world of web3 technology.

The H2D initiative was conceived with the mission of demystifying the realm of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and web3 technology. It began with the creation of an insightful book set to be published by Penguin Random House in 2024. Education plays a pivotal role in adopting frontier technologies, and H2D recognized this as a significant piece of the puzzle.

So we started a movement. In 2023, H2D initiated a series of local conferences to grow local communities and empower builders. These events are platforms to bring together builders, founders, and global web3 thought leaders. By doing so, H2D showcases the possibilities of blockchain and internet-native organizations and brings web3 closer to web2 audiences.

Nowadays when people settle for digital communication and opportunities for human interaction are limited, the importance of meeting people in person cannot be overlooked. Face-to-face interactions build trust, promote understanding, and encourage collaboration. Facilitating authentic connections between individuals who share goals and aspirations is crucial, helping them learn from one another, provide mentorship, and even start businesses together. While online collaboration is convenient, in-person meetings cement community bonds.

Nurturing Innovation Through In-Person Connections

Inspiration can strike at any moment, especially when you least expect it. You may come across posts by leaders in the web3 space on platforms such as Medium, Farcaster, or X. While these articles can be informative, engaging with like-minded individuals is what often leads to ground-breaking innovation. Meeting people who share your passions can open doors to new opportunities, help you better understand their perspectives, and challenge your own ideas. Real-world interactions can also transform short-term projects into long-term endeavors, providing a unique opportunity to connect with others on a deeper level.

Blockchain and decentralized technology are no longer exclusive to the tech industry. The web3 ecosystem encompasses various fields: decentralized science, decentralized finance, decentralized non-profits, digital art, and more. True innovation lives at the intersections of industries and expertise. Attending real-world events exposes you to a multitude of possibilities.

Hundreds of examples exist whereby seemingly “random” encounters make history. One of my favorites is the story of Richard Garfield, who, after years of working on his traditional game, met Peter Adkison, the visionary behind Wizards of the Coast game company. Though initially interested in Garfield’s board game, RoboRally, Adkison’s entrepreneurial instincts were seeking something more — a portable, expansive game with the potential for continual growth. Under the verdant canopies of Oregon’s trails, Garfield’s eureka moment struck: the transformation of his existing Five Magics game concept into a collectable card game where players could weave their personalities into decks, creating a unique gaming identity.

This meeting of minds led to feverish months of design, drawing from an eclectic mix of games like Cosmic Encounter, birthing a game system where cards could sometimes overrule established norms. Richard Garfield’s brainchild, ultimately christened Magic: The Gathering was set to become more than just a game; it would be an ever-evolving universe, an eternal gathering of minds and strategies. Magic: The Gathering became a tremendous success, acquired by Hasbro for $325 million and having printed more than 20 billion cards.

The ‘How To DAO’ initiative gained momentum after we, Puncar and Owocki, attended Consensus 2022 in Austin, Texas. Although we had already worked together in Gitcoin, being in the same place and meeting face-to-face created a magical moment, leading us to pursue the idea further. After a few emails and a couple of months of work and dedication, we had a publisher and multiple partners on board. We might’ve never gotten it off the ground without that in-person chat.

Be a Part of the Future of Web3

We’re excited to invite you to our upcoming event in Istanbul on Monday, November 13. The H2D journey began with a successful event in Paris in July this year, and we’re thrilled to keep the momentum going with more events planned in 2024 across cities like Denver, Dubai, and Brussels. Our gatherings offer workshops, talks, and parties — all crafted for expanding your horizons, facilitating networking, learning, and having a great time in the web3 world.

We owe our success to an ever-expanding pool of trusted partners: Divinity, Tally, Commonwealth, Dexe, UMA, Nethermind, Giveth, ZKX, VitaDAO, Mangrove, and our media partner, Bankless Publishing.

In an increasingly digital world, we appreciate the value of real-world connections. Our events bring together people with different backgrounds, industry experience, and competencies to learn, collaborate, and innovate. Whether you’re an artist, a developer, a student, or an entrepreneur — there’s a place for you in the web3 ecosystem.

If you want to discover what’s possible in this internet-native world, join us at a ‘How To DAO’ event near you. Be part of the future of web3.

Author Bio

Puncar is passionate about supporting the web3 ecosystem through designing the right incentives, tokenomics, and governance structures.

Editor Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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Building the Future Together in Web3 Communities by Boluwatife

DAOs Are Playgrounds for Growth and Development by Siddhearta

DAO Pain Points and Paths Forward by MemeBrains

If you’re deep into web3 and active across the ecosystem, in any typical week you’re signing multisig transactions, voting on Snapshot or Agora, minting NFTs in a hot wallet before sending them to cold storage, or trying to chase the next 100x memecoin in the degen Olympics. Suffice to say, your wallet interface gets a lot of use.

You may like to use multiple wallets for these tasks — perhaps a combination of hot and cold wallets — but keeping track of which wallet is for which action can be challenging. An additional factor is that copy/pasting wallet addresses is not only inefficient but also provides scope for mistakes and subterfuge, particularly address poisoning. Fortunately, there’s a great web3-native solution to your wallet management woes: the Ethereum Name Service.

Most of us know this protocol as ENS, which pioneered technology to map wallet addresses to human-readable names; it’s what gives users the .eth suffix to the user names you see in Discord and on X. ENS enables users to send funds to hirokennelly.eth rather than a long hexadecimal address, but the protocol also enables a host of other functions to help you manage your web3 life, including ENS subnames. The guide below assumes you already have a top-level ENS name set up, but if you don’t, you can find several resources across the web, including the ENS official documentation.

What Is a Subname?

A subname can be set as a prefix to your ENS name, for example vote.hirokennelly.eth. In my current wallet management system, I actively use five different subnames depending on the function of the wallet:

An aside on security: Subnames are easy to set up, but require a bit of forethought to make sure you are managing your wallets as securely as possible. For example, the admin.hirokennelly.eth address is the owner and manager of the top-level ENS (hirokennelly.eth) and subnames, and I have it linked to a Ledger that I only use for ENS management. This is because if someone gains access to the wallet with which you manage your ENS names, they can change the addresses and you would probably be none the wiser until it was too late.

Subnames make a complex web3 more manageable and transparent, allowing you to create named wallets for the different types of actions you want to take. If you want to send funds to cold storage, link your cold wallet to a ‘vault’ prefix. Do you often sign multisig transactions? Create a ‘sign’ prefix. Do you have a wallet for degenerative cryptoeconomics? Create a ‘degen’ prefix so you can easily fund (and track) your memecoin chasing. In fact, since I’m a lover of degenerate cryptoeconomics but don’t have that subname, we’ll create one in this guide. Let’s get started.

How To Create a Subname

To create a subname, you must have access to the wallet that manages the top-level domain. For most people, that’s probably the same wallet address as your ENS name.

Step 1: Connect to an ENS Management Tool

Your first step will be to go to the ENS App, which allows you to manage ENS domains. Connect your Ethereum wallet by clicking on the ‘Connect’ button.

Step 2: Navigate to Your Domain

Once your wallet is connected, navigate to the ‘My Names’ section where you’ll see a list of domains you own.

Note: Since I use a subname to manage my domains, you’ll notice that the admin.hirokennelly.eth address is the Manager and Owner of the top-level hirokennelly.eth name (and all subnames).

Step 3: Navigate to the Top-Level ENS Name

Click on the ENS name for which you want to create a subname.

Step 4: Create the Subname

Navigate to ‘Subnames’ and click on ‘New subname’.

Clicking on ‘New subname’ will bring up the prompt needed to create the new name. In this case, we’re creating a wallet for degenerative cryptoeconomics, so we’ll use ‘degen’ as the new subname. Type the subname in the Label field and click Next.

This next step is a blockchain transaction, so make sure you have ETH in your wallet. Once details are confirmed, click ‘Open Wallet’.

Clicking ‘Open Wallet’ will prompt you to sign the transaction for subname creation. Once the transaction has been executed, click ‘Done’.

Congrats, you now have a subname, but you are NOT finished yet!

Step 5: Manage Your New Subname

Now that you have your new subname, you’ll need to point it to a wallet address.

Click on your new subname, which will bring up the familiar-looking options to manage domains and subdomains.

Next, navigate to ‘Records’, which is where you’ll link the new subname to a wallet address. Click ‘Edit Records’.

This brings up a prompt to edit Text, Address, and Other. Click ‘Address’ and the ‘+ Add Address’ dialogue box.

This will bring up a prompt to add an ETH address (and many others!). Click on the ETH icon.

Here you can paste the wallet address to which you want the subname to point. After pasting the address, click ‘Save’.

Setting this address will also require you to execute a transaction in your wallet, similar to the steps above to create the subname.

Congrats; once finished you can now use the address to receive funds! Just to make sure I did it correctly, I always send a little dust (a very small amount of ETH) to the subname. Once you’ve confirmed you are good to go, you could consider your work finished, but guess what, you’re still not done yet! We have two additional bonus steps to get the most out of your subname.

Bonus Step 1: Set Your Avatar

After you’ve successfully pointed your subname to your wallet, click the ‘Profile’ tab for your subname. Once there, you can click on ‘Edit profile’.

You can edit your profile in any number of ways, but let’s just stick to uploading an avatar. Click on the familiar circle with a + in a camera icon, which will enable you to choose an NFT to connect it to or to upload an image. Choose the ‘Upload Image’ option.

Select an image to upload, and click ‘Continue’.

You’ll need to sign the message, and then run a transaction as with the above to set the avatar as the image attached to the subname. Once finished, you’ll have your chosen image set as your avatar!

(As you can see, I have just the right chippi avatar to add to my ENS family!)

Bonus Step 2: Reverse Record Set

The reverse record set makes it so the subname (and often the avatar too) will display instead of your wallet address. To do this, you’ll first disconnect your wallet.

Reconnect with the wallet address that is attached to your subname. Once connected, click on the connected wallet address and choose ‘Settings’.

Once in Settings, click on ‘Choose primary name’. From there, select the subname and click ‘Next’.

Note: you will need ETH for this transaction, so if this is a new wallet address, be sure to transfer ETH to it prior to this step.

This will again be a blockchain transaction, so click ‘Open Wallet’, and sign the transaction. Once executed, your wallet address in the upper-right corner will display your avatar and subname!

A final way I like to check this is to go to Etherscan, search by your subname, and verify that the subname appears in the block explorer by clicking on the ‘Resolved Address’ wallet address (which will be the same as the wallet address to which the subname points).

Subnames For Optimal Organization

Apart from setting up subnames for your personal wallet management, the use cases for ENS subnames extend to organizations. From payroll processing (hiro.banklesspublishing.eth) to inter-organizational payments (marketing.banklesspublishing.eth) to managing wallets for multiple digital assets (eth.banklesspublishing.eth or btc.banklesspublishing.eth) and even project management (newsletters.banklesspublishing.eth) the practical applications for subdomains are vast.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with ENS, and the functionality of the protocol extends far beyond top-level domains and subnames. For now, load up some ETH and create your own subname, explore the other functionality within the ENS App, and take pride in beginning to use the technology around us to make your web3 life better. Technology is here to help us, but only if we put in the effort to learn how to use it.

Author Bio

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and shipper at Bankless Publishing, builder at BanklessDAO and DAOpunks, and a lover of people, Moloch, and degenerative cryptoeconomics. 

Editor Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

Designer Bio

ab_colours is a versatile designer with over seven years of experience. He specializes in doing product design, UX design and brand identity. He has been DAOing for the past eight months and has been able to amass quite a lot of knowledge about the fascinating blockchain space.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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How confident are you that you wrote down your seed phrase correctly? Are you positive that nobody could have accessed it? You didn’t happen to type it in a Google document, or email yourself a copy…did you? Could your seed phrase survive if your home suddenly went up in flames?

Taking custody of your crypto can be a daunting prospect. It is possible to do it securely, but many people fail to properly set up their wallets and then fall victim to the pitfalls of this lack of preparedness.

The first thing to understand is that having a hardware wallet is by far one of the most secure ways to take custody of your crypto. Unlike a hot wallet, you have to be in possession of the physical hardware wallet for you to transact with it. However, there is one crucial security factor to keep in mind: hardware wallets, like nearly all wallets, are set up using a seed phrase, which is a randomized collection of 12 or 24 words that control access to your cryptocurrency wallet. That means anyone who has your seed phrase will also have the ability to transact from your cryptocurrency wallet.

Do Your Future Self A Favor

The person you must be most concerned about when it comes to handling your seed phrase is yourself. It is more likely that you, the user, will mishandle your own seed phrase and lose it or accidentally provide access to it. Sure, there’s always some chance of an “Act of God” incident to occur that could lead to the destruction of your seed phrase, and we’ll talk about that too. But generally, seed phrase vulnerability arises because of user error.

Our propensity for user error is why we must take precautions to ensure that we set ourselves up for success when implementing our crypto wallets for the first time. The following is a guide that will help those new to self custody — or even crypto veterans — to understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where their crypto is actually stored.

I’ll use the following tools to demonstrate the process:

• Ledger Nano S and recovery sheet provided.

• BlackSeed Ink Crypto Seed Wallet

• 16GB USB thumb drive *Optional*

• Copy of Ubuntu Linux *Optional*

• A working pen and an ultra-fine tip Sharpie

For this guide, I’m using the Black Seed Ink seed phrase metal plates to engrave the sample seed phrase on. This seed phrase protector is made from 304-grade stainless steel. Why is this important? Because it can withstand temperatures between 1400°C-1450°C (~2552°F- 2642°F), which is hotter than the average house fire, which burns at 537°C-1093°C (~1000°F-2000°F). Additionally, the Black Seed Ink seed phrase protector was given an overall grade of A by Jameson Lopp, who tested various metal seed phrase storage devices, including applying a 1093°C (2000°F) flame from a large propane torch to the device for 10 minutes (or until failure was observed), submerging the storage device in a bucket of 16% muriatic acid for 12 hours or until bubbling ceases, and applying a 20-ton hydraulic press to the storage device and checking for readability. These are impressive tests, but for me, the choice was simple because the cost was $27 and it came with an engraving pen — much cheaper than its equally high-rated competitors.

Optional Prep for Securing Your Seed-Phrase

The following optional steps are for users who are unsure whether there is malware on their PC, or are using a public PC, or lean a bit more paranoid about their crypto. However, it is not necessary for everyone to do this; it is perfectly acceptable to start at Step 1. These optional steps cannot be performed on an Apple computer.

Optional Step A: Create a bootable Ubuntu Linux USB Stick using the 16GB USB thumb drive

Optional Step B: Unplug/remove/disable any WiFi card and/or Ethernet plugs to ensure the computer is not connected to the internet.

Optional Step C: Boot from the Ubuntu Linux USB stick (DO NOT INSTALL UBUNTU).

Optional Step D: Connect your Ledger to the PC in order to power on the device.

Optional Step E: Follow the instructions for setting up your Ledger Nano S, Ledger Nano S Plus, or Ledger Nano X.

When writing down your seed phrase, I recommend not speaking aloud each word or writing them down with a webcam present. DO NOT TYPE THEM ON YOUR COMPUTER, IN A NOTE APP ON YOUR PHONE, OR EMAIL THESE WORDS TO YOURSELF! THIS SHOULD ONLY BE WRITTEN DOWN VIA PEN AND PAPER.

Optional Step F: Connect the PC to the internet and install Ledger Live according to the instructions provided by Ledger and then proceed with the set-up process.

If you completed the optional process above, please proceed to Step 3 below.

Step-By-Step Guide to Securing Your Seed Phrase

Step 1: Install Ledger Live based on your current operating system.

Step 2: Follow the instructions to set up your Ledger.

I’ll say it again:
When writing down your seed phrase, I recommend not speaking aloud each word or writing them down with a webcam present. DO NOT TYPE THEM ON YOUR COMPUTER, IN A NOTE APP ON YOUR PHONE, OR EMAIL THESE WORDS TO YOURSELF! THIS SHOULD ONLY BE WRITTEN DOWN VIA PEN AND PAPER.

Step 3: After properly setting up your Ledger, install either the Bitcoin App or Ethereum App and create a wallet address using the interface within Ledger Live.

Step 4: Create a test transaction and transfer a tiny amount of BTC or ETH (depending on what you chose in Step 3) to your new wallet address.

Step 5: Erase your Ledger by unplugging the device, plugging it back in, and inputting the wrong password 3 times. This will force restore the Ledger to the factory setting, erasing the seed phrase. Finally, remove the cryptocurrency wallet address from Ledger Live by deleting the account within the app.

This step may seem counterintuitive but it is incredibly useful as it helps establish and teach the user two important things: (1) your crypto is not stored on your Ledger device (or any hardware wallet) ever, and (2) it checks to see if your handwritten recovery phrase is legible and correctly written.

Step 6: Recover your crypto via the seed phrase that was written down following step 2 above.

Step 7: Re-install the BTC or ETH app (whichever one you chose in Step 3) and create a new account in Ledger Live. You will see the same address available for import. This will verify if your Ledger has access to the wallets with the small amount of cryptocurrency.

Step 8: Once you have verified that your cryptocurrency is present in the wallet, transcribe the seed phrase from the Ledger Recovery Sheet onto the Black Seed Ink sheet.

I recommend first writing each word with a Sharpie and then tracing over it with the engraving pen. Black Seed Ink recommends using a lead pencil.

Step 9: Once again, factory reset your Ledger by unplugging the device, plugging it back in, and inputting the wrong password 3 times. Then remove the account containing the wallet address from the Ledger Live app.

Step 10: Once again, recover your crypto using the seed phrase engraved on the Black Seed Ink plates.

Step 11: Install the BTC or ETH app (whichever one you chose in Step 3) and add the wallet in Ledger Live. This will once again verify if your Ledger has access to the wallet with the small amount of cryptocurrency.

Step 12: Once verified, you now know that the seed phrase written on the Black Seed Ink sheet is correct. There is no longer a need to have the Ledger recovery sheet.

I recommend setting it on fire to properly dispose of this.

Ain’t Nobody Gonna Steel This Phrase Away

Once the information is safely transferred to the stainless steel plate, you’ll still need to take steps to ensure that it is stored somewhere secure; the Black Seed Ink site suggests “a secret hiding place or home safe”.

Between the optional and mandatory seed phrase security steps, I hope that you learned how to be safe and secure with your most important asset: your seed phrase. Please take the time to review this article and make the necessary adjustments to ensure that your seed phrase will be available for you to access that generational wealth you’re building. Crypto security is hard, but with patience, the steps to securing your seed phrase should be both actionable and motivating. Stay SAFU frens!!

Author Bio

LiveFast9986 is a DAOpunk and trying to make web3 a better and more approachable place.

Editor Bios

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about web3, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO, an Associate at Bankless Consulting, and is now and forever a DAOpunk.

Designer Bio

ab_colours is a versatile designer with over seven years of experience. He specializes in doing product design, UX design and brand identity. He has been DAOing for the past eight months and has been able to amass quite a lot of knowledge about the fascinating blockchain space.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

This post does not contain financial advice, only educational information. By reading this article, you agree and affirm the above, as well as that you are not being solicited to make a financial decision, and that you in no way are receiving any fiduciary projection, promise, or tacit inference of your ability to achieve financial gains.

Bankless Publishing is always open to submissions for publication. We’d love to read your work, so please submit your article here!

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