Month: April 2021

First off, if you had asked me two weeks ago if I would be privy to a half million dollar NFT deal for a space-themed metaverse game, I would have thought you were crazy. Maybe I should stop thinking that. So last Saturday, we formally launched a dao to pool funds to buy these Star Atlas meta-posters, and yesterday, one of the members has entered into a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) for the entire set. It’s nuts. The deal is still being worked, but it’s pretty much a sure thing from my understanding, so now there’s a bit less pressure on me to move fast.

We are still going to be working out lots more details in the next couple days. I’ve got to figure out my stake, within this side deal, and how we integrate it into the broader organization that is the Interstellar Alliance. There is a lot of work to do. I have a call with a hedge fund guy who invests in the NFT space, so we’ll see if he’s interested in participating.

I’ve got a busy day. I’m still technically employed, so I do have a couple outstanding issues that I have to deal with. My mom is stopping by for breakfast on her way through town, and I was supposed to meet my boss for lunch later today. That’s going to be an interesting meal. We also have a “date” with a local entrepreneur and his wife, we’re going to bring the kids over for a swim and hang out, so I’m looking forward to that.

One thing is clear to me already. Quitting my job is opening up a host of possibilities that I don’t think I would have access to if I was still trying to hold onto it. Of course we’ll see how it turns out in the long term, but right now, it’s looking pretty damn good.

Another beautiful day, and it’s hard to believe that the week is already halfway over.

Yesterday was Workers’ Memorial Day, and my wife, a Union activist and leader, threw a small rally to commemorate the occasion. We had about twenty people there, and press from the local newspaper and one TV channel. It wasn’t a great turnout, but considering that most of her local are work from home now, it probably wasn’t too bad. We brought the kids and let them hand out stickers and posters for people. They were actually well behaved, which is nice.

Funding for SAIADao is moving along, we’ve got thirteen funding proposals at a hundred dollars each. One member was able to discover a discounted pre-sale from the Atlas Co. team. I’m still trying to verify the details, but it seems that our timeline has accelerated. It’s like one of those late-night infomercials: ACT NOW, SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED!

I still really can’t stress how fascinating this whole thing is. The Solana architecture is amazing, and I can’t wait to start digging into it — once I catch up on Rust — and the vision behind Star Atlas is pretty ambitious as well.

This is probably the biggest, nerdiest thing I’ve ever done, forming an investment dao to purchase a bunch of virtual goods for a video game. I kid though, Star Atlas has the potential to be more than a video game, there’s a serious opportunity to make real money here. It’s a very long-term play though.

I’m feeling a little bit of pressure to come up with funds. Alto is still holding up my transfer because of “upgrades”, and I’m feeling a bit perturbed considering all the effort I had to go through to move things around. Meanwhile ETH is holding $2700. I’m considering selling some $MUG tokens to cover my share in the dao, and I’m also looking at buying a pack of week one posters on OpenSea using my IRA wallet, and reselling them in the coming weeks. The only question is whether I have the liquidity to make this a multi-week play. Do I spend my lot on a bunch of week one posters and try to resell them, or do I just try to see how high I can climb the rewards. I dunno.

Still, I’ve already met a bunch of interesting people and I’m sure no matter what happens with this particular proposal, that I’ve made some interesting connections that should pay off in time. Well see.

I also found out last night that I turned down a six-figure job offer. I interviewed with the Lattice1 team a few weeks ago, but we all could tell I wasn’t feeling very enthusiastic about it, and so they went someone else. They told me last I was their top pick, but I just wasn’t keen about it. From where I was standing, with all the focus on retirement, I just couldn’t bring myself to going right back into another “job”. I’ve spent over eight years with Zombie, LLC., as the key man with basically no backup, and I just want a damn break. Hopefully I won’t look back on this in a year and regret it.

I don’t think I will. I’m following my heart right now and it feels great.

So we are off to a great start this morning. I got a great night’s sleep, basically slept like a rock till 7:30AM, and meditate outside before popping open the laptop. It’s a beautiful day outside today, high sixties and cloudy. There’s a nice breeze outside, and everything is so green.

The @staratlas Interstellar Alliance Dao launch, SAIADao, has been going well. We opened "tributes" today at 100 wxDAI and have a good flow going. https://t.co/3RCCw8G83T

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) April 28, 2021

I had a nice voice chat with a couple of the potentially bigger SAIADao, I can’t say again how excited I am about doing this. There is so much opportunity. For right now though, there isn’t much to do for it other than make sure the proposals are moving through.

I have been trying to learn as much as possible about Solana. I’ve been reading the docs at night and listening to podcasts about it. I’m feeling really bullish on it, and cursing the fact that I got stopped out of a trade on it and Serum so long ago. Alas.

I have a huge tranche of funds that I pulled out of my brokerage IRA, but now Alto is holding it up, and haven’t responded to my emails for two days. It’s all the more frustrating because I’ve seen them do it in one day before. I’m already missing out on a moderate BTC run, and ETH is at ATH, so I’m really feeling anxious. Once that last ACH clears, then it should only be a few hours over to my crypto exchange, and then I can deploy the funds.

Index Coop’s FLI token, a 2x leveraged ETH derivative, has been a very good investment. I bought in with ETH at $2000, and so I’m up quite a bit here at $2700. I think that’s going to be my preferred play for right now.

Rune is exciting as well, but I’m not paying as much attention to it since I don’t really have enough right now to do any major staking. I wanted to use it to put some native BTC to use, but the return right now is quite modest from what I understand.

I’m trying to figure out how much of my ‘bitcoin’ allocation I want in native BTC, and how much I want in wBTC. Native BTC is less risky, but the opportunities in DeFi are starting to show up. Badger launched a Yearn vault that is over 100% right now, including about 15% in native BTC, and that’s the best I’ve seen out there. It’s limited right now, so I’ve also got fund in Klondike wBTC/kBTC pool, Bancor’s IL-protected pool, and have been using Vesper.Finance’s vault as well.

I had originally planned on putting 20% of my funds into DPI, but BasketDao seems like a much better deal right now. It’s got interest-bearing versions of the same components, and the farming opportunity for its BASK token is much more lucrative. I did take advantage of the Zerion DPI/INDEX cash back promo last week, but as soon as that airdrop clears I’m throwing my DPI in the converter to be make bDPI.

And Alchemix, oh Alchemix. I am probably going to do something here a bit crazy. Now that the Star Atlas NFTs are on OpenSea and I’ve secured the first one for SAIADao, I’m looking at buying a few extra. They have 50-pack for poster one on there for $3200, that I might purchase and try to flip. I could post $6400 in Alchemix, take out a loan, buy USDC and buy the 50-pack basically risk free. Once the sale is ended I could post half of my posters at maybe twice the price and see if they sell. Or maybe I’ll bundle them and make Tier 1 or Tier 2 bundles. There’s a lot of ways to go about it, but starting with an Alchemix loan might be a way to protect myself from the downside.

Worst case scenario, I’ll have fifty Tier 0 rewards that would redeem for in-game rewards worth about 90% that I could sell as well. There’s a lot of opportunity here. I haven’t breached the subject of using an Alchemix loan to cover the full $500k NFT purchase; we don’t have the funds, and it’s not worth my energy to try and sell them on the possibility at this point. We’ll see how things go for the next few weeks, my attention is better spent elsewhere for now.

Well, where to begin?

Went to bed on time last night, and got woken up at two AM because one of the kids had an accident for the second night in a row… at least it was only one of them this time. I let Missus handle it, but I wound up waking up at 3AM with my mind racing. Took a melatonin and tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. Finally got up to meditate around five and caught some sleep before my dad came over. I had to take him into the hospital.

He’s getting open heart surgery next Monday, and they wanted to check him out for a bypass before they open him up. I wound up having to drive him in with both the girls in the back seat as Missus needed the car and I didn’t want to bug the neighbors for a sitter. We dropped him off and came home, then World War III broke out. First Younger, after I caught her sneaking a cookie, and then Elder at lunch after I called her out for having an attitude and got into a power struggle over lunch. I swear, I thought the girl was possessed. By the time Missus got back at two I was such a wreck, so I took a nap and went for another hour and a half drive to pick my dad up. He only needs one bypass, thankfully.

Of course during the day I’m chatting with the Interstellar Alliance core team, trying to figure out everyone’s agendas and trying to keep us from getting into a situation where things could get out of control later. It’s a precarious balancing act with everyone’s egos, including mine, but so far everyone seems to be getting along.

My working hypothesis is that launching a successful dao is all about balancing power. We launched with fifty people, and we’ve got twenty four membership proposals working through it now, I think five or six of those might be for the week one, hundred dollar buy in, so I think we’re doing ok. The dao system is a bit technically complex, but we’ve only had a few problems, and I think the documentation that I’ve written has helped out a lot.

The mechanics of the NFT purchases for Star Atlas are going to prove to be a bit more challenging. I opened a Gnosis vault a few days ago, and was able to use it to purchase the first NFT on OpenSea today. There was a quite a bit of overhead in gas, so I wound up paying double for the $64 poster, and I haven’t even moved it off of OpenSea yet. We’re definitely not going to want to use Eth mainnet if we can help it, but it doesn’t seem like the Solana tools have been built out yet. Multisig only seems to be available if you have a Ledger, and several IA core team members are going to have to buy them before we can proceed with it.

It’s definitely going to be cheaper to do things on Solana, but we’ve got a ways to go before we can operate in any full capacity within it. While it’s a super impressive project, and the more I learn about it the more bullish I feel; it just doesn’t have the core tools that Ethereum has. Maybe I can help change that, but I’ve got to get up to speed, fast.

Bossman called me and invited me to lunch Friday. He said he wants to “pick my brain,” I’m wondering if it’s going to be more like an exit interview or if he’s going to try to make me a partner or something. I don’t think there’s anything he can offer me that will make me change my mind. There’s too much opportunity at stake here.

This is the first time I’ve written evening pages in a while, but this morning I was too much of a wreck to get it done. Hopefully tomorrow is back to normal.

This is now a Star Atlas stan blog

Well, I’m pretty proud of myself. I managed to go out of town with the kids for two nights, and I somehow still managed to stick to the meditating and writing. The last couple times I’ve gone out I’ve had trouble sticking to the routine, so it feels good to keep the streak going. Onward and upward.

SAIA Dao seems to be moving on it’s own. We’ve got an influx of new member proposals coming through, and there’s intense discussion about structure and tokenomics. I’m doing a bit of infrastructure work, mainly trying to demonstrate how proposals should flow through the system.

I’m working on one now to allow funding to proceed. I spent some time yesterday putting together a draft proposal. It starts out with a low funding level, $100, with a 1000% share bonus, this incentivises early participants while ensuring that people with less capital available at the start. For week 2, the bonus drops and the capital limit goes up. I’m still playing with the numbers and playing around with the variables. I’m trying to test edge cases to make sure that these early incentives won’t deplete a significant portion of funds if a whale want to join at a later date.

It’s pretty intense right now, I’m connecting with so many new people, and some of them have pretty impressive backgrounds. I’ve been talking to potential investors from all over the world: Singapore, Australia, Central Europe, and some place called New England; people that have been in crypto way longer that me, Solana devs. It’s exciting.

It feels like this has already become one of my obsessions, and I’m wondering how long it’s going to last before it burns out. It’s not even about the game, to be honest, but the opportunity to build something. Maybe it’s the desire to prove myself. I haven’t gotten the sense that I’m being egotistical about this, more that I’m trying to build something and prove that it works. I didn’t build DaoHaus or Gnosis, or Star Atlas, but putting these pieces together in a certain way with fifty or two hundred people and proving that it works would be an accomplishment for me. I think maybe that’s what I’m trying to prove.

The Lift.Kitchen launch was Saturday as well, and I helped out over there for a bit and have been harassing their founder during the run up. He sent me a request to do an interview for a Medium article that they want to write. Some of the sample questions he asked:

• How blockchain can improve the human experience?
• How gamification is impacting defi\crypto?
• How the world of crypto and philanthropy will intersect?

I’m not sure how I felt when I got the message. It felt, weird. Maybe it’s a bit of imposter syndrome to an extent, and my initial reaction was to say no. I didn’t though. They asked if I had a bio that they could use, and now I feel like I’m being asked to write a resume. I’m wondering if this might be an opportunity to doxx myself a bit. It somehow feels like a big ask. I’m not sure those questions are ones that I can expound upon extemporaneously, so I think some prep work will be necessary. This is likely some sort of test. I’ve half-jokingly threatened to come work for Lift.Kitchen, since most of the team has only been in the crypto space for six months or so. And hell, they did just raise $1.3m during this Genesis launch.

I’ve got five weeks left with work. Five more Mondays, as technically I told my boss June 1 was my last day. And I’ve promised SetProtocol some more work today. And my dad is having open heart surgery next week, and summer break is coming up. There’s just too much going on for me to think about jumping straight into another job. There are too many opportunities. I just hope I’m not passing them up.

So, flurry of activity the last twenty-four hours. I managed to convince the Interstellar Alliance’s hegemon to sign off on the dao, and we’ve already got about 30 applications signed up. It’s pretty exciting. Lift.Kitchen just launched their LP event, and I staked the minimum needed for the longest amount of time to get the biggest bonus with the smallest stake possible. They’re having a bit of a problem with their accredited investor attestation, but I managed to stake funds manually using Etherscan. So far so good.

I drove the fam up my father-in-law’s last night and spent some time chatting with him about everything. It must be exhausting talking to me, cause I was a motormouth, trying to talk about everything going on with SAIA Dao and everything else. I helped him move some tools from one of his properties, and was just struck by how gorgeous it is out here in the mountains. Completely beautiful.

We met the girls at a Chinese buffet for lunch and pigged out, then took the kids to the playground for twenty minutes. They’re watching TV and all the adults are laying in bed. I wasn’t able to do my regular morning routine first thing this AM, but I made sure to get my meditation in and wanted to jot a few notes down to keep the habit going.

The Star Atlas rewards are looking pretty fantastic, and I think people are pretty excited about it. I’m going to go see if the rewards are live and test whether I can purchase them using the Gnosis Vault that I set up yesterday. (Eth gas fees are under sixty right now, I can’t believe it.) The IA team is working on a tokenomics proposal, so that seems like it’s going to be interesting to develop that with them. What I’m really looking forward to though is getting some Solana tokens and poking around to see what I can find in the Atlas Co. programs. I might be able to do some poking around, and try to see if I can ID any developer wallets and do some corporate espionage, maybe a little bit of grey hat stuff.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to learn enough Solana and enough about the game system that will be able to automate the mining and resource gathering stuff. It will be a huge advantage for the Alliance if I we can build one of these ‘efficiency algorithms”.

Well, I pulled a late night an managed to get the Star Atlas NFT pool proposal completed. I even managed to stick it on a Gitbook instance, and then I went ahead and wrote the Phase 0 instructions, with links on how to set up Metamask, add xDAI, and put up a Google Form to collect submissions. I went to bed exhausted and slept like a baby. Woke up this morning and had five responses on the form, but it only seems that a couple of them managed to get screenshots posted. I’ll start sorting addresses later today, might even peek at them on Ethereum if I’m nosy.

Bitcoin is absolute garbage today, and just broke under $50k. ETH hit an ATH and is looking strong. I had a phone call with my brokerage yesterday, and should get my next tranche of funds disbersed to AltoIRA today. I’m not sure if there’s going to be time to ACH transfer funds from there to my bank and wire to the exchange on Saturday, I’ll probably be looking at Monday or Tuesday.

I’m going to need to buy some SOL. I’ve been reading through the Solana docs yesterday and am kicking myself for getting stopped out of that swing trade several months ago. That’s the way things go. It’s still relatively cheap, given where I think it’s headed, so I’m gonna start dollar cost averaging in and put a full risk allocation in as soon as I’m able. And I’m really going to have to find some time to learn Rust and figure out how to write programs on Solana. It is a very different beast than Ethereum at its core, and is going to take some real work to understand it.

I’m just going stream of consciousness here, so I’ll roll with it. Someone in the Homebrew Discord tipped me off to a new Runescape-type game that will be launching with NFT support on Binance Chain. It’s called Mist.

Looks promising, although they didn’t sell out their IDO. I bought $40 worth of tokens and staked them for LP, cause I figure it’ll be worth playing with Elder when it comes out. She made me play one of these tycoon games on Roblox and I’ve never seen anything more mindless, so this looks like it it might be an interesting alternative.

Last thing. One of our clients is a Navy warfare command. We’ve been managing their non-classified network for several years. Last summer I got called in by NCIS to provide information on a phishing attack against one of the users on the site. (We don’t manage their workstations.) Apparently he clicked on something he shouldn’t have and then they used his navy.mil account to try and mess with someone they shouldn’t have. I got called in for an interview and spoke to an investigator for a few hours. It was no big deal, and I figured the issue was resolved.

Then yesterday, I’m cutting the grass and ge a call from Bossman. Apparently the NCIS just rolled up in the client’s office and pulled the server out without any explanation other that “counterterrorism investigation”. So that happened. I assume they needed it for forensics (good luck with that), but they way they left the client down like that is some kind of next-level asshole stuff. I’ve got backups of the server VMs? Am I supposed to spin it up or is there some sort of malware that I’m supposed to know about? I swear. I’ve still got to clean this up this AM.

I’d much rather deal with wrangling people in daos than having to deal with crap like this. Retirement awaits.

Today is already halfway over and I’m just now sitting down to write. Things are a blur. I’ve been focused primarily on engineering the dao and NFT token purchasing process for the Space Atlas launch. It’s been somewhat exhausting trying to get people on-board with the idea, like herding cats, as they say. I’ve spent most of this morning dealing with a Quickbooks upgrade for a client and trying to get my kids to stop arguing and actually get their chores done. I feel like the day is slipping away from me.

I’m hoping that I can finish a general proposal by tonight, which would give us about 24 hours before the first NFT goes on sale. I think the broad outline is there, I’ve just got a lot of details to put together, including

I had to liquidate a bunch of stocks in my IRA to get ready for this next transfer to my checkbook IRA. It’s a bit painful as my portfolio is down 25% percent since last week. Still, I sold off a half dozen positions, basically all my smaller positions and anything that wasn’t crypto related. I’ll have to deal with that later, but hopefully I can move things fast enough to get in on this BTC dip.