When this happened the Shepherd was transparent, paused the current contract, and communicated to the community effectively. 

https://twitter.com/wolfdotgame/status/1462665060908736515?

After several people in the discord recommended creating a bounty program for the community to find and submit bugs/vulnerabilities in the contract, the Shepherd introduced a bug bounty program.

https://twitter.com/wolfdotgame/status/1464410849263513602

Since now there’s a new contract and new game mechanics, the Shepherd quickly reintroduced a plan for how the game was going to work and what was going to happen with $wool. 

https://twitter.com/wolfdotgame/status/1463735240418115588

The Shepherd also began working with auditors and publicly announced working with Mueller Berndt, also known as The Herdsman, who is an award-winning independent security researcher.  

https://twitter.com/wolfdotgame/status/1464098347048914945?

All of this is transparency helps me gain conviction around Wolf Game. When you combine that with the innovation that happening with the game, the speed in which they’re shipping code, and the people that are publicly supporting the game, I am very woolish on Wolf Game.

P.S. Someone from the community named Skarly Warly created this really cool dashboard that tracks the floor price of wolves, sheep, land, farmers, and wool pouches.

In this post I’ve outlined a few things that I think are interesting moves:

Buying and Staking AXS on Ronin

You can buy AXS on any centralized or decentralized exchange. When you buy AXS on a centralized exchange like coinbase, you’re purchasing it on Ethereum. To stake your AXS you need to move your AXS from Ethereum to Ronin which is the native blockchain for Axie Infinity. To move your AXS from Ethereum to Ronin you can use the Ronin bridge. You’ll have to have a Ronin wallet setup to do this. Once it’s in your Ronin wallet you are able to stake your AXS and earn rewards. The current APR is 113%. 

OlympusDAO

Buy OHM, stake, and earn rewards in sOHM or gOHM. They just released their v2 migration which moves your position from sOHM (your staked OHM) to gOHM which is their cross-chain governance token. The current APY is 4,424%.

Time Wonderland

Buy TIME, stake, earn rewards in MEMO. This protocol is built on the Avalanche mainnet. The current APY is 81,231%. 

Wild Credit

Decentralized lending protocol with isolated pairs.

Liquidity Protocols

There’s a few trusted and known liquidity protocols for earning money on your crypto assets. The ones i’ve heard a lot about are Aave, Compound Finance, Yearn Finance.

I compared 3 stablecoins (DAI, USDC, and Tether) on each platform to see which ones are offering the highest APY for staking/depositing:

These are all fairly simple plays for people that are new to DeFi. I’ll begin diving into more advanced strategies and share my learnings here.

Hit me up on Twitter if you think I missed anything.

My twitter: @ryanashank

This post is a step-by-step guide on what to do first in the space.

Here’s an overview of what I’m recommending:

1. Purchase crypto on an exchange

2. Setup a self-custody wallet

3. Purchase ENS name

4. Purchase a Ledger

5. Go to Uniswap and swap ETH for another token

6. Buy an NFT on OpenSea

7. Transfer NFT from hot wallet to Ledger

My belief is that if you get your hands dirty and experience the power of self-custody wallets and owning your assets, you’ll reach the “ah-ha” moment and understand the generational innovation that’s happening with web3.

Step 1: Purchase Crypto on Exchange

I would recommend purchasing ETH using an exchange like coinbase and then sending that ETH (once it’s settled) to your self-custody wallet (metamask, rainbow, coinbase wallet).

Step 2: Purchase ENS Name

After you’ve bought some ETH and sent it to your crypto wallet, I would purchase an ENS and set it as your primary ENS name. You can do this using Ethereum Name Service (or ENS).

I would then go to opensea and login with your wallet. You will be able to see your ENS as an NFT in your opensea profile. This is your first NFT!

Step 3: Purchase a Ledger

Next I would order a ledger. This is an offline, cold storage wallet that you need to physically sign with the device. There’s a lot of scams right now in crypto and having a cold storage wallet adds an extra layer of protection. It still does not protect you if someone gets your seed phrase or if you sign a transaction that has something malicious in the contract.

You should only order your Ledger directly from their website - no amazon or resellers - there’s some supply chain fraud going on. Once you receive your ledger, integrate your ledger with Metamask by clicking “add hardware wallet”.

Step 4: Swap tokens on Uniswap

While you’re waiting on your ledger, go to Uniswap and swap some ETH for another token. This will show you the power of decentralized exchanges, liquidity pools, and getting some tokens that aren’t available on centralized exchanges like coinbase. You can get tokens like $GALA, $FWB, or virtually another other token. Make sure you are swapping for the actual token and not a scam token. You can go to coingecko and search the token and copy the contract address and enter that in uniswap.

Step 5: Buy NFT on OpenSea

Next, I would go to opensea and buy an NFT. You can start with buying something cheap like Tools of Rock (floor around $80) or Koala Intelligence Agency (floor around $300). This will teach you how to look at NFTs, search by properties, and purchase items. You’ll sign the transaction, experience paying gas (sucks!) and see the transaction in your opensea profile and your wallet.

Step 6: Transfer NFT to cold storage

Once you buy and NFT with your hot wallet, transfer this NFT to your ledger. You can do this from the item page by clicking on the “transfer” button which looks like a gift box. Enter your ledger address that you can copy from metamask. You will pay gas to transfer the NFT. Now switch your metamask from your hot wallet to your ledger and view that NFT in your opensea profile tied to your ledger. Now this NFT is safe. ** **

Couple things to note:

1. Write down your seed phrase, never type into your phone or take a picture of it. Store this seed phase somewhere safe - if someone gets your seed phrase they can take all your crypto and everything is irreversible.

2. Twitter is where everyone in crypto hangs out. This is where you’ll find out about new project and what people in the space are thinking.

3. Discord is where all the crypto projects host their communities. Tons of scams happen here so I’d recommend turning off DMs in each server that you join. Never click a link, never trust a DM from someone, and never give out your seed phrase ever. No one will ever ask you for your seed phrase.

I’ll add to this post in the future. DM me on Twitter if you think I left anything out.

My twitter: @ryanashank

Let start by looking at why web3 matters. Below is a really good tweet thread by Chris Dixon, a partner at a16z, who is focused on web3.

https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402

Why web3 matters: https://future.a16z.com/why-web3-matters/

Quick summary:

Web1 (roughly 1990-2005) was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network — users and builders.

Web2 (roughly 2005-2020) was about siloed, centralized services run by corporations. Most of the value accrued to a handful of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

We are now at the beginning of the web3 era, which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of web2.

Web3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens.

Here’s how I view the web3 landscape:

1. Tokens

2. Wallets

   1. metamask, rainbow, coinbase wallet (these are all self-custody wallets meaning you control the private keys/seed phrase

3. NFTs

4. NFT Marketplaces

   1. Opensea ($10b valuation and largest marketplace)

5. Centralized exchanges

   1. Coinbase, Binance, FTX, Gemini, Crypto.com

6. Decentralized exchanges (Uniswap)

   1. Allows people to swap tokens (i.e. swap ETH for $GALA)

7. Staking protocols

   1. OlympusDAO (overview article), Time Wonderland (overview video)

8. DAOs

   1. FlamingoDAO, FWB

9. Play-to-earn games

   1. Axie, Gala, Wolf Game

10. Metaverse

    1. Sandbox, Decentraland

11. Software Dashboards to track holdings

    1. Zapper.fi 

12. Taxes

    1. CoinTracker, ZenLedger, TokenTax, Koinly

13. Liquidity Protocols

    1. Stake crypto and earn interest or borrow assets

    2. Aave, Compound Finance, Yearn Finance

    3. Rari Capital - They also offer their Fuse pools product which allows anyone to lend, borrow, and create isolated lending pools (community created pools)

Good Readings:

• Coopatroopa DAO landscape

• Why NFTs are a generational innovation

• Gaby’s web3 reading list

Interesting projects I like right now:

• Royal - a music tokenization platform that incorporates music royalties into tokens (NFTs) that anyone can buy or trade. They raised $55m in Nov 2021 from a16z, chainsmokers and others after previously raising $16m just 3 months prior ($71m total raised).

• Flyfish Club (check out this youtube overview video here) - Gary Vee’s new NFT membership restaurant in NYC. Think of this like a membership club similar to Zero Bond or Soho House where you have to have the token (NFT) in your wallet to gain access.

• IndexCoop / TokenSets - Create, manage, and grow your own index fund of tokens

• Pallet - Job boards that allow you to curate roles for your community and connect members with businesses you support (ex. Gaby’s Web3 Job Board)

DAO Tools / Resources:

1. Governance: @AragonProject (https://aragon.org)

2. Voting: @SnapshotLabs (https://snapshot.org/#/)

3. Token gating: @Collab_Land_ (https://collab.land)

4. Treasury: @juiceboxETH (https://juicebox.money/#/)

5. Community: @discord

6. Multi-sig wallet: @gnosissafe (gnosis-safe.io)

Other tools recommended by @coopahtroopa that are acting as the defacto standard for most DAOs today:

Discourse - Forum commonly used to discuss governance proposals.

Coordinape - Coordination game to determine which contributors(s) deserve token rewards.

Parcel - Treasury management to easily track and send payments.

SourceCred - Instance to track community participation and reward active members.

Mirror - Finance creative projects through tokenized crowdfunds.

Tally - Governance dashboard to track on-chain voting history across different protocols.

Boardroom - Governance hub for tokenholder management to empower key decision making.

Sybil - Create and track on-chain governance delegation.

RabbitHole - Reward tokens for completing specific on-chain tasks.

Together, this stack allows anyone to spin up a treasury, introduce governance, reward key contributions and engage communities in ongoing discussions.

People to follow on Twitter:

1. Beanie

2. Hunter Orrell

3. Kevin Rose - Partner at True Ventures and podcast host

   1. Modern Finance podcast - all things crypto / blockchain

   2. Proof NFT- NFT interviews

4. Gaby Goldberg - Investor at The Chernin Group Crypto (TCG)

5. 3lau - DJ and founder of Royal (platform to buy ownership in songs via royalties)

6. Alexis Ohanian - founder of 776 ventures / founder of reddit

7. DCInvestor

8. Blake Robbins

9. Jacob Martin - NFTAttorney who launched NFT Tax Guide

   1. This is really cool. He created a “Tax Guide” document that you purchase as an NFT for .08 ETH (around $300).

10. Coopahtroopa - venture partner at Variant Fund

    1. Good tweet on starter DAOs

There’s many, many more people to follow on Twitter such as the people on this NFT list created by my friend jsunderulo.eth. I’ll add more people to my list later on but for now it’s a good start.

I’m also excited about more projects than I listed above but want to do more research on them before I commit to adding them to this list.

As I learn about more things in web3 and find them interesting, I’ll also add them here. DM me on Twitter if you think I left anything out.

My twitter: @ryanashank

I was really excited about this idea so I quickly wrote down a ton of thoughts on the idea.

After I got excited about this for about 2 days, I decided to call my friend James and run the idea by him. He agreed with me that something like this should exist. He told me about a couple platforms that are similar which led me into doing more research. As it turns out, there’s already a number of projects tackling this very idea.

In my opinion, the project that looks the best is TokenSets (absolutely no affiliation with them whatsoever).

The platform is setup for 2 types of users:

• Crypto Investors - People that want to invest into a bucket of tokens that represent a certain theme or thesis

• Fund Managers - Experts in DeFi that want to put together a pool of tokens into an index fund

To become a fund manager and create an index fund (which they refer to as “sets”), it’s as easy as following their 3-step creation wizard and verifying just ONE transaction on-chain.

You essentially just add tokens to your set and then choose the weight of the token within the set. There’s a slider that you can also lock once you select the % weight for each token.

Once you select the tokens in your set, you go to the next page to setup a few fields of metadata where you’re going to choose the name of the fund, the ticker symbol, and the starting price for your fund.

Once you have done that, the final page is verifying the information and creating the fund on-chain.

The one thing that I noticed when I was going through this was that gas was about $2000 (or .4 ETH). Not sure if it’s because it’s creating a new contract and needs to do a lot of stuff with the tokens, but it was enough to give me a barrier to entry on my test index fund.

Streaming Fees

Streaming fees are basically the way that fund managers make money. They are charged to the people that purchase the index funds and are paid on a yearly basis. I’ve seen a range of 0% up to 5% on most of the funds on TokenSets. I took a look at some of the top funds and did a quick calculation on how much the fund managers are making from the streaming fees based on market capitalization (assets under management) or the amount invested into their fund.

I’m going through TokenSets and some other companies now and i’ll post a more detailed write-up soon with some thoughts. For now, i’m curious to hear your feedback about index funds and TokenSets.

I’ll add to this post in the future. DM me on Twitter if you think I left anything out.

My twitter: @ryanashank

https://twitter.com/nik_carpentieri/status/1456320483251695618

Here’s the thread typed out for easier reading:

On web3: "I've gone from cautiously optimistic to borderline irrationally excited" -@alexisohanian's panel at @NFT_NYC was the most exciting 30 minutes of the whole week.

See below on why you should care about the evolution of media in this new paradigm

We're going to look at web2 as this weird ‘blip’ of internet history, where we saw glances of what it can be. Social media proved that you can get a bunch of disparate random strangers behind pseudonyms to collaborate at scale."

"We saw glimpses of what happened when you put fiat rails into it (i.e. Kickstarter), but what was missing were real rails for capital and ownership. Now that we can create entire worlds from the bottom up (@lootproject), we’re going from MVP to 'Minimum Viable Community'."

"Community is finally getting the respect it deserves in web2 platforms, but it is foundational for a project. True bottom-up building from the earliest believers who now have a stake in something even as simple as a jpeg, is wild. And we’re still in the most basic era of it."

"The things that we would have imagined the internet to be capable of in the mid-90s, are probably where we’re thinking web3 is capable of right now, and I/we can’t even begin to describe in terms of what’s to come, but I know that the trajectory is powerful."

"In 2005, the only incentives Reddit could provide people were just internet points that you don't get to carry with you, but now that these points have real value, these systems are going to win in a big way"

"It's clear that we care about our online persona more than we do our offline. Having a front-row seat to @Reddit, all of this stuff feels so obvious. Which is why I'm so hyped up about it"

"The 'right-click save-as' community is great for the space. Let them share NFT's as much as possible. Nobody cared about the Mona Lisa until it was stolen and became a meme 100 years ago, but we've all grown up to believe it's extremely important."

Memes = Long Term Value

"I really hope the best elements of @Reddit find a new life in web3. In web3 there is no single authority making the choices, it's a community that can make an even clearer value statement."

"Web3 creator communities will be so much bigger because what's being built today is borderless, leaderless, and up to human creativity."

"Creators currently have more leverage than they've ever had in human history, and probably will ever have again. Starting your creator journey right now is doing it with the highest leverage possible."

"The web3 version of@LilNasX (referencing time it takes to reach mass virality - so a web3 'Old Town Road' success) is going to blow people away. Understanding virality, community, and memetic strength is a huge asset."

Hit me up on Twitter if you think I missed anything.

My twitter: @ryanashank