Undecided

Hopefully today can be a bit of a reset from yesterday, which just wasn’t that great of a day. I got some good sleep — Younger slept in her bed all night yay! — and didn’t waste an hour at the bus stop this morning. I meditated and have my tea, and am ready to sit down and start cranking out some work.

The question at this point is on what?

StarAtlas.exchange is up, but is not quite racking up the referral fees. We did the math, we need $3.2m of post orders to clear on there if we’re going to clear a profit on it, which could take a while. We don’t really have a marketing plan, so unless I’m going to spend all day pumping it in the official SA market channels, it’s not going to generate the needed traffic. There’s a list of things that we can improve on, my main concern is getting the cost down on our EC2 instance, but that doesn’t really matter if we still need to keep a $500/month RPC endpoint. I spun up a new instance last night and tested using Elasticache instead of Redis, but I need to figure out how to migrate the production data set to it and switch everything over. Plus I still need to figure out how to automatically update the markets when Atlas Co. adds them.

I could spend a lot more time working on it. The charts are acting weird, they’re not showing gaps if there are no sales, and are showing strange volume activity. I’m not sure how accurate they are. And there are a lot of cosmetic enhancements that we could add by updating descriptions and making other things more user friendly, but I’m not sure how much time to spend toward that.

One thing that I do think would be helpful long term would be for me to work on pulling historical data from Solana using Quiknode’s new endpoint. I have one from a friend that I can use, but I’d likely be starting from first principles to connect to the API, pull and collate data. I’d probably want to do that using Python, which would pull me away from the JS work that I’ve been doing. Still, working on this could potentially solve several problems: rebuilding trade data for Serum markets and providing cost basis for wallet transactions, just to start. So even if I couldn’t figure out how to integrated it into the exchange, it could be beneficial for PnL calculations, which would help me as dao manager. I would like to be able to rebuild Serum market trade data though, and who knows what else we could figure out with onchain data.

There’s a lot of administrative stuff that I need to do with wallet management. I alone control the keys for the ALPHA hotwallet and need to get a Shamir’s secret sharing scheme setup so that I don’t disappear and leave everyone out to dry. I’ve also got the wallet acquisition funds that need to be transferred over to the multisig vaults. I need to convert the privkey to a format that I can load in the CLI and transfer over everything. I’m delaying on that because of the cost of creating new token mints for each of the assets.

And to top it off, the most recent new shiny thing: Metaplex. I’ve been asked to assist in a new top secret NFT project that’s related to. Now thing pushes all sorts of buttons for me, but it’s very complicated. It involves Solana contract code that I might have to deploy, new frameworks like Next.js and deployment vendors. There’s new architecture involved with it as well, and the synergy with everything else is quite tempting. Man, is it tempting.

And we don’t even have the Star Atlas mini-game ready. There’s so much chatter in my various groups about how we’re going to build tooling (read bots) for that, but I think I’m going to leave that to others for now. They’re trying to figure out how to use Selenium with the web3 library to keep fleets running round the clock. There’s only so much we know with that one, so we’ll probably put that to the back burner.

Well, writing this out has made me realize what’s the most important thing I can be doing right now. I need to get to it.