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Business plan hack plan

Today has been a bit of a mess. I just finished putting the first application of putty over the hole I made in the bathroom wall months ago when I got mad at Elder. The girls are down the street at a birthday party, and I’ve been messing around with Solana trying to get the week’s Star Atlas poster on Serum and losing my mind.

Solana transactions are nothing like Ethereum’s EVM transactions. I’m at the point now where I can follow the transfers of tokens going in, out and every which way, but Solana is just a completely foreign beast. Seriously, what in the hell is this?

I must have tried five transactions on the Serum DEX before I figured out that I needed to pay for the posters at a higher price as there was an exchange fee in the transaction that wasn’t displayed on the site. Oh well.

I just sold another week one poster on OpenSea, bringing my total to five sold. I’ve managed to sell all of them for at least double the starting price, but I’m going to run out of capital in a week if I can’t move more of them. I’ve already got fifteen of week two, which ends sales any minute, and Ill be able to afford nine of next week’s posters with the starting capital and proceeds that I’ve got now. My business plan is below.

I’ve figured out that I can list on OpenSea without any gas, and allow others to scoop them up from me, covering the cost. Changing the price or cancelling is going to cost me, and then there’s the whole situation with moving them over to Solana when I’m done. I figured that the posters would be works of art in their own right, and non-gamers would be willing to pick them up on Ethereum at a premium, and it’s mostly been borne out. There is a pretty big price discrepancy between the networks, as gas is a huge consideration. So to that end, I bought five of this week’s poster on Solana. I’m not sure how I’m going to split things moving forward, so we’ll just have to see how the price moves.

I got my Ledger wallet yesterday, and moved my IRA funds to it. God, I hate it. Compared to the Trezor or Lattice it is obviously inferior device. Inputting the pin is a pain, and I couldn’t even get it to work on my Ubuntu workstation yesterday. It may have been operator error, but the Trezor’s ability to enter the pin via the keyboard’s number pad is so much better.

I actually started looking at what it would take to bring Solana support to the Lattice. They’re going to be opening up the device’s SDK a bit, so I may try to dig in with that. I signed up for the Solana hackathon, thinking that it might make a good project, but the hackathon starts in a week and ends on June 7th. I had thought it started on June 7, and the device won’t be ready for me. As alternatives, I considered joining up with someone to try to port the MolochDao or Gnosis Vault contracts, but then I saw this Tweet.

So, yea, I know what I’ll be working on during the hackathon! Now to come up with some arcade game ideas.

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Building the Nebuchadnezzar

Dreams you can’t remember but keep searching for an answer

I’m not sure exactly why I’ve been having problems with my sleep schedule lately, waking up at 3AM in the morning has never been my thing, and I’m not particularly enjoying it. It doesn’t help that I get woke up by Younger, or that the cats like to stampede through the house, making me think that we’re getting robbed and spiking my adrenaline. I’ve always been a light sleeper, even since I was a teen. I could never sleep as long as my mom and dad were awake, and I could hear them watching TV or talking and getting ready for bed. I suppose that this is one of the reasons that I’ve always gravitated toward being a night owl. I’ve heard that some people with ADHD tend to be night owls as well, getting most of their work done in the hours when everyone else is quiet. It certainly works for me in the morning.

As my tinnitus has gotten worse over the years, I’ve taken to keeping a fan on, and more recently a noise machine. My wife has convinced me to start making a habit of going to bed at 10PM, and I’ll read a book on my iPad or dead trees for a bit before going to bed. Sometimes I’ll take a melatonin, but I’m wary about over using them because of the tolerance, and because of the fact that lately when I take them I wake up at three in the morning and can’t go back to sleep.

I am one of those people who seem to get by with less sleep than most people. Certainly less than my wife, who would be happy to sleep twelve hours a day if circumstances permitted. I think it’s one of the reasons that our relationship has worked so well over the years. She liked to sleep, and I got to stay up late playing video games. At least before the kids came along, anyways.

So this morning I woke up from a dream — something about an alien invasion and trying to fight back against the oppressors. We were on the run and came to a dead end in a canyon. We were trapped — and I woke up. I tried to go back to sleep but then the cats knocked something over or made a noise, maybe it actually came from outside, but a part of my brain yelled HOME INVASION THEY’RE COMING FOR YOUR CRYPTO and then my adrenaline spiked and started running though response scenarios.

Meditation has been helpful in quieting things down, but most of the time I fail to fall asleep, so I lay in bed, until there’s some thought that won’t let go and I finally give up. Of course this morning it was related to the dao proposal that I’ve been working on for two days now, trying to come up with a proper incentive scheme to incentivise early participation. So I got up, boiled water for my tea, medidated, had some ideas, gave sleep one more shot on the couch and now I’m up for the day. It is twenty after six. Such is my life these days.

So I’m very close to finishing the dao proposal. I have some more writing to do, then I’ll be ready for some more community feedback. Yesterday I spoke to a computer science student in Singapore. They “manage equities” for their family and said they were looking at a minimum investment of fifty thousand dollars. We talked for an hour, and I was able to secure a promise to move forward with the broad plan that I described. So I just need to finish writing out those broad strokes so that I can give everyone a day to join before the sale launches.

All this work with DaoHaus on xDAI and with the Gnosis safes has really given me some great ideas. Even beyond the NFT sale, this may be a great way to organize the family business. xDAI would mean that the wallets would be easy to manage, share wise, and I could just run everything from a Gnosis safe. I could setup my dad and brother as owners and we could just have a one of three multisig on it. Might work out beautifully, depending on gas costs. Might get a bit more complicated later on when we start , but I think it’s the solution that I’ve been looking for.

Side note, I ran across this firm, Korporatio, that sets up offshore entities in Panama and other locales. The created entities are managed through on Ethereum through an interface that looks strikingly like DaoHaus. Too expensive for me to consider right now though.

I’m going to be very happy with myself after the NFT dao is launched. I’m still excited about Star Atlas itself, my conversation with the student from Singapore touched on Solana a bit. Since the game will run on Solana, and most of the game’s underlying infrastructure will be publically accessible, it means that we’ll be able to write our own programs to interface with it. It’ll be like hacking into the Matrix from onboard the Nebuchadnezzar. We should be able to access the game’s API and manage things from outside of the official game client. Fun. I was skimming the docs for Solana yesterday, and it looks like it’s going to be a long road to that one.

From what I can tell, there are so far no dao projects active on Solana, so hacking together something that resembles MolochDao looks like it’s going to be our first goal if we are going to bring SAIA Dao to fruition.

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Space Corp

Decentralized Autonomous Corporations in Space Atlas

TL;DR: Read the DAO NFT Pool proposal here.

So yesterday we wrote about airplane crashes, now we move to space ships. Yesterday I became aware of Star Atlas, a new space-themed MMO that is launching soon. It’s like EVE: Online, or Star Citizen, but it incorporates blockchain mechanics and will run on the Solana ecosystem.

I’ve been a gamer for decades, and I’ve always loved space fighters, going all the way back to XWing vs. TIE Fighter and Wing Commander. I spent years playing EVE, but it was a huge time suck. I made a personal decision to scale back my gaming activities some time ago, as I figured that I wanted to spend more time playing the game of life. I still enjoy the occasional causal game, but I purposefully stay away from AAA open ended games, especially MMOs. I’ll admit that my personal and professional life has benefited from this decision tremendously. I treat investing and crypto as a game these days, running up my score via trading and yield farming. It’s much more lucrative than playing in imaginary worlds, and was one of the main reasons that I shied away from games like Elite Dangerous. Spending an hour of my day flying a trade mission across a dozen systems just did not seem like a productive, let alone enjoyable, use of my time.

This Tweet came across my TL yesterday and took up most of my day. The game is still in production so I read through the whitepaper and was seriously impressed. It seems to be iterating on all of the latest and greatest games of the last couple years: EVE, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and No Man’s Sky, among others. It incorporates much of the game play mechanics that you would expect from these games, but then merges with with blockchain tech: in-game currencies, governance tokens, NFTs, and a defi ecosystem that includes lending, AMM and yield farming. As you can expect, I am very excited to see how this plays out.

The game is launching in several phases, the first will be the Galactic Asset Offering (GAO) in which in-game assets will be sold as NFTs on Opensea. Mining, staking and yield farming will be available during this time, but the assets won’t be playable until phase two, when an MVP browser based mini-game will be available. The target is July. There will another phase, a shipyard-configuration module before the final pre-sale before launch. There’s no ETA on when that will launch, as far as I know.

Prior to the GAO will be this ReBirth: Genesis NFT sale. It’s fascinating. They’re going to sell a series of thirteen meta-posters, each one available per week. The price for each series will go up, and they’re divided into tiers that will unlock certain rewards or in-game bonuses. On top of that, anyone collecting all thirteen NFTs will be able to claim a special fourteenth NFT. Details are the NFT rewards are light right now, but I can imagine they’ll be sufficient for the investment.

Obviously, I’m not willing to spend $524,000 on a series of NFTs, but I assumed that there was some group that was. I had read about a DAO that had bought an NFT for $5.4 million, so I went looking to see who was actively fundraising to pool resources.

I popped on the Star Atlas Discord and quickly found a guild named Interstellar Alliance, and found a dao/pool discussion already ongoing. No one was putting any serious proposals together, so of course I went to work and started writing.

The general idea is to use a DaoHaus/MolochDao guild to pool resources. Stake in the DAO –shares — will be proportional to investment. Ultimately, the goal is to purchase all thirteen NFTs to earn the last one. From there the dao can vote on what gets done with them afterward. This could be a speculative play, to sell the collection off or to farm rewards that come from them. The collection can be bundled and tokenized in a way that they can become tradable, or the assets can eventually be bridged over to Solana for use in game. Those details will have to be worked out later, as I’m primarily focused on putting together something that can be done in a trustless manner. There’s been much interest in the proposal, and we already have 19 pledges for a minimum total of over $39,000. We still have a ways to go, but we have enough interest to move forward. I think there will be enough excitement once things start moving that we’ll have no problem finding full funding. For now I’m focused on Kovan testing to make sure that I understand the gas costs needed to operate DaoHaus and Gnosis, and working out additional details with the community.

This project really fascinates me. It bridges daos and smart contracts, speculative investing, community management, and opens up an opportunity to learn how to dev on Solana, (and learn Rust). I’m going to be digging into this over the coming weeks to see whether operating or being a part of one of these in-game DACs could actually become a viable career. Imagine, playing a video game and making enough real-money revenue to live off of. It sounds like the future.