A Year Around The Sol — Rugged.
Happy Birthday to ME!
Not M.E, I mean ME! See what I did there? If you survived holding assets a full year in this market, give yourself a pat on the back. Between a global market recession, war tension, and the collapse of Terra Luna’s stable peg, the volatility of the crypto market has shaken out plenty top-tier traders, and investors alike. While some are waiting for the expectation of crypto going to zero to buy back in, others are carefully watching catalysts. Innovation is sprouting from all angles, and this is what I have learned this past year as a rookie, and how that applies to the NFT and crypto space.
Intro To NFTs
My journey began with buying a birthday present using spot trading profits. It sparked my dive into NFTs earlier 2021 on the pre-regulated Gate chain, BNB, and Rarible platform. My original goal was to learn how to use NFTs as a new medium of artform while recovering from my work related injuries. Unfortunately, some of my first mints were lost during my first scam experience, but after re-minting some of my own artwork and figuring out no one I knew had a clue what an NFT was, I realized I was on my own and embarked on a quest to figure out the mystery behind NFTs.
- What determines the price of Non-Fungible Tokens?
- What drives the demand and who sets price?
- How does one differentiate the value between the art and given utility?
How I Ended Up With Too Much Time?
Early 2020, I got injured under a sink and lost my career in super lame, yet catastrophic work comp injury, leaving me with a nasty lingering case of Cubital Tunnel Syndrome. While attempting to recover from multiple delayed surgeries, the shattered post-op surgical care from the worker’s comp system and constant denials of post-op treatment forced an inevitable shift from a “Plumbing / Mechanical Hydrovac operator” to “Permanently disabled MMI.”
I am currently unable to lift more than 15lbs without intensifying daily nerve damage in my left arm.
Moving forward, I slowly began to find the anonymity within some NFT communities therapeutic, as I had no one to talk and relate with about my work-injury. The server rooms allowed me to get out of my head. A room to escape and converse with others all over the world within the different community servers finding bits of peace with people of similar interests. This helped my build back up my self esteem and motivation towards building a new career.
Luckily during my sleepless nights, curiosity became my best friend. I was compelled to get to the bottom of blockchain, and remember being up at 2:00am in my surgical wraps on the phone with Spectrum trying to get them to set up a service that neither one of us understood. (Q-NAP NAS drive = network-attached-storage system for Storj Labs). After 6 hours on the phone with Spectrum’s most patient Customer Service Representative on Planet Earth, I realized the rabbit hole I stumbled into, and how I needed a few extra things to make it work such as:
- A more powerful computer with over 8gb of Ram and SSD since Optical Drives are inefficient to run anything new.
- A physical unit to purchase comparable to in size to a modem or small desktop computer.
- A BS in Computer Science to dissect what just happened on the phone for 6 hours.
While learning this information in real time, I swapped my remaining crypto into to Ethereum, created a few different hot wallets to test, and ended up becoming the first person in my entire network to successfully send crypto off of an exchange, and into a non-custodial wallet to explore permission-less blockchains.
No cookie needed.
The PicoTop and Initial Shift To Solana
With a near Halloween birthday the timing could not have been better. Regardless of the undeniable amount of scams in cryptocurrency or NFTs, the excitement was pure. It was a truly euphoric time for the crypto and NFT space as there was still a lingering bull market and heavy volume.
Activity, volatility and opportunity was brewing within the Ethereum and Solana NFT communities, and sold out mints were a regular thing.
A number of events caused the initial 20% down turn in the crypto market, marking all time highs and the pico-top. One event was El Salvador betting on Bitcoin to re-brand the country, mixed with native politicians threatening Democracy. Other negative catalysts could include current Twitter Complaint and Hotline Operator Elon Musk yelling “To the Moon” on SNL crashing $DOGE, or Anonymous calling him out for his alleged market manipulation saying his crypto tweets are destroying lives did not add any reassurance to an already bearish trend.
Bitcoin is the swaying ship that creates the movement in the market. If $BTC drops, the rest of the market will inevitably follow suit. This past year has shown an interesting similarity to the S&P correction a year ago, when Dec — Jan was also the all time high for US Stocks showing possible proof of institutional correlation.
My First NFT Experiences
One of the biggest differences I saw between Ethereum and Solana was the community atmosphere. While starting from Gate and moving to Ethereum knowing no one, the surrounding atmosphere was very misleading. Most were nowhere near helpful and few were welcoming. Bored Apes were the red carpet egomaniacs of the NFT space, and gas fees became the biggest turn off to expansion and adoption. Eyes wide open, I saw a false sense of community being built around projects, and there seemed to be no way for this to sustain long term if few truly wanted to hold product.
While the deflationary mechanics of burning $ETH were important, it was essential in order to ensure useability of the chain. The controversy in EIP-1559 prepped for ETH 2.0 Staking Validators although it was portrayed like smoke and mirrors to the general public at the time. In the past month or so, Ethereum has successfully merged to Proof Of Stake marking the beginning of a new era in permission less blockchain development.
Migration From $ETH to $SOL
Between trying to mint Jungle Freaks prior to the racism call out, or watching the Pancake Squad mint start ten minutes earlier than announced, it was a realization of the toxicity acquired from the get rich mentality brought people in for the wrong reasons. Money is going into projects people can’t afford to lose, while not even intending to support the vision of what’s being built by the creators. Hoping to sell high and strike it rich with every mint, I watched the previous market irrationality destroy projects while claiming to be community oriented. Having the majority of the buyers in it for profit, the White List Meta was flourished.
As someone inspired by games like Axie and Neo-Tokyo Identities, I realized that this cost barrier eliminated the majority of the world from adopting and participating. I noticed a migration to Solana from the developer community claiming the near-gasless fees and hyper speed TPS could possibly allow for games to be built.
This is the user experience that other chains were missing.
Little did I know the NFT and Art community would be ready to flourish as well. So naturally, I did what everyone does best their first time around and got rugged on my first Solana mints by: Soloth Street Club, Wild Wolves NFT, and Panda Squad, PixSols, and Boss Bears. Previously, I had experienced Polygon to be the original chain used for scam NFTs. One of my first NFT experiences on OpenSea was purchasing a scam that I thought was in the original collection, but was too new at the time to understand how to double check and cross verify.
The NFT movement sparked from Ethereum created a side effect that grew like a virus, and forced the necessary migration to proof of stake in order for the chain sustainability. Stressed validator nodes could not continue processing mint demands successfully, and removing the asset from circulation did not help stabilize the price, nor add TPS; every day users could barely interact with the chain.
If you are new to the NFT space and reading this, make sure to follow official links from verified Twitter or Discord accounts only to control your risk exposure, and anyone in your DMs first is a scam.
Cheers.
The Birthday Shift and The Ball Drop
Regardless of rugs, there was an undeniable excitement in using Solana and the Phantom Wallet. It was clearly lightyears ahead compared to previous experiences with Metamask, Trust, and both non custodial wallets by Coinbase and Crypto.com. The speed was unmatched, and after learning I could process around 80–100 Transactions with $10, this incentivized motivation to further explore.
For anyone that has experience with Uniswap, Sushiswap, Polygon, PancakeSwap, BakerySwap and others, I would encourage you to venture Solana DeFi such as Tulip Protocol, Raydium, Orca, CropperFinance, and DeFi Land and experience the platforms for yourself!
Competitive and over allocated NFT mints drew excitement as only a few pennies would be lost if you didn’t get your mint. Since Solana tech was using the Metaplex Studios protocol Candy machine V1, there was no allow-list abilities at the time which forced projects to innovate on the fly just to launch in ways that would benefit early supporters creating the need for fair launch protocols.
As a supporter, not having to overextend finances to compete with rich people is more appealing. This immediately made the experience more enjoyable as you were not so initially out of pocket on a purchase, regardless whether the project sustained during high network traffic. Unirexcity Adventures and Shkary Sharks were two projects that I missed the mint, but was able to purchase on official marketplaces like Solanart and Magic Eden, with my funds instead of assume the loss of high network gas fees.
As a child of the 90s, the main projects on my acquisition list included: Nyan Heroes, Arrivant (Project Elluune), Furious Flowers, Tower and Meta-Homes for the art and innovation at the time. I am still holding strong on all through the ups, downs and Million dollar rugs pulls, while taking minimal profits along the way.
To truly hold strong, there is an element of conviction needed to believe that this innovative tech will blossom real life utility and spark environmental and socio-economic change. While buyers stay hopeful for disruptive change in billion dollar industries…like gaming, other industries are making moves to spark change like: cannabis, music, supply chain tracking, and digital identity are a few other sectors being tested with a prolific future on the rise.
Welcome To The Wild Wild West
The amount of scams that were coming to Solana and infecting the community and project morale was rough. This could partially be a migration from Polygon scammers mentioned above finding new money, volume and an increased amount of new collectors searching for art, community and investment opportunity.
Mixed with a tremendous amount of premature tech, this unfortunate ripple effect led many community members strait into a loss. Whether it was an unofficial NFT, or click-bait free mints that drained your wallet with a malicious smart contract, there is no short of nefarious project. Some projects used compromised verification bots to steal personal login credentials. Then gained the ability to lock out server moderators and admins by social engineering communities into believing the drain sites are actually in fact “official project links”. Decentralized servers hosted on Discord and Telegram are a cesspool of scams, social engineering attempts and black hats waiting for prime candidate to ask for help and show vulnerability.
Quickly wanting to separate myself from the negative, and aid in the progress of builders alike, I volunteered to moderate servers for projects that I was especially inspired by like Sounds Rare by Looks Rare Studio, Solands, and Joe Shmoe NFT.
In This Year I Learned
Don’t trust anyone and people are full of shit. Confirmation bias is the enemy, and skepticism is your best friend. One minute you will see an alleged thought-leader post on social media share about a project, while having that project listed on secondary for sale to at the peak. Adding to the mainstream cliché of Ponzi schemes, maybe two weeks later the allegedly doxed founder of the project deletes the Discord server and main Twitter account taking the funds with them and leaving the community in the dust.
Never chase people, and never chase charts.
What Can We do?
Here Are a Few Worth Mentioning.
- Mature as buyers and hold project founders accountable prior to minting and giving them your money. Reshaping the way projects mint starts with us as consumers. Never be afraid to start asking questions. Shillain Villain is a great example of sparking a movement to push founders buttons on public Twitter spaces, vetting whether or not the project deserves your money.
- Use your gut to drive the need for data driven answers. If something feels off, it probably is. Whether it is misleading information from website, exchanges or project founders, something that feels to good to be true probably is. If you are able to find the signs prior to launch of a project’s bad intentions, instead of listing your project and leaving, find a way to say something to community members outside the server and form a group with other holders and blow the whistle. This can save the community from demise by opening up a window of communication for all holders that would otherwise be unavailable considering once the server or profile is deleted, no additional data for community members is retrievable. One great example of a successful de-rug would be Taiyo Robotics.
- Start holding secondary marketplaces and launchpads accountable. This is where community presence can help encourage the proper growth needed for chains to expand, by ensuring quality control of the anonymous buyers market. Whether the claim for the NFT is digital art, tech-tools, or a proof of ownership pass, there is no short of demand for profits. With manipulation at every corner, speaking up lets community members know about the potential risks of a project and that is just as valuable as the alpha call.
- Not every project will succeed. There is a tremendous gap of tech knowledge needed to incorporate blockchain and NFTs into the real world to provide given utility. Even some projects I hold dear like MetaHomes are currently stuck in need of a developer. While this might not be a community issue, being around for a year as an aspiring blockchain developer following mostly builders in the space have shown me quite evidently that most “community members” will leave at the first sign of struggle.
- If you really believe in a project, there is plenty of ability to DCA and average down. One year in the market is not a long time, and there are plenty $1000+ dollar NFTs you can buy for less than $300 due to the mismatched price in crypto. Still people would rather continue to gamble flips and forget about the strong projects building out the ecosystem that they can buy for a quarter of the price from a year back. So pick your projects wisely.
Protect yourself by limiting your exposure to projects launched by untrustworthy people in the space, and people with limited public recognition.
Community?
With new found volume and demand, it was clear which community members are just along for the quick flip. Most are a hybrid of traders and immature investors. The concept of move money or lose money has plagued the ecosystem for better and worse. This mindset prompts impulsive decisions, and plays a part in missed deadlines for development, while also aiding a driving force of demand
It is not uncommon for members to nag a founders into overpromised poor decisions, or mis-directing a project. The unfortunate side is when these traders became the bulk of the market project choices get motivated by quick profit and not quality control. Horrible ideas get pushed and projects deter off course with demands of unreasonable and irrational requests.
As new monthly PFPs would change on Twitter along with all their holder roles, these project founders were left with little to no members left and minimal morale to continue.
So What Now
At time of writing, Solana is dealing with two major dilemmas.
- Royalties between projects, artist, marketplaces and launchpads. Regardless if 0% royalties are an unsustainable method of business revenue, the reality is this did not impact the space for the better. It has caused so much distress for artists and creators that certain projects gave up or moved chains. Few found a work-around and adapted to the 0% royalties, and the ones that did were already bulletproof like Degen Trash Pandas.
Whether it was artists who had contracted royalties now temporarily void on spot at protocol level, or the rise in AMM’s like Hadeswap and Elixir to circumvent this issue of secondary market percentages, it seems that the solutions will require deep rooted debate. Ultimately, network wide decisions will determine the route of centralization vs secondary marketplace. As to whether creator royalties should be engrained at a protocol level, no decisions have been set in stone.
2. The immediate necessity for more nodes and added decentralization to the Solana Network is crucial to sustainability and longevity of the chain during peak network usage. One key difference between Ethereum's and Solana’s NFT craze, is Solana would process the sent transactions as opposed to a failed attempt and loss of gas fees. Therefore bots were able to DDoS attack the network to smithereens during high traffic mints like Okay Bears, collapsing the network and causing outages for specific RPC providers.
This enabled sniper-bots to grab all the assets at the cheapest price causing a market bounce ripple effect by out pacing the collectors and driving FOMO to induce the traders market. While arbitrage volume is not all a bad thing, the blockchain suffering outages is. Coincidentally, Google and Google Cloud just recently leaked on twitter stating they would be running a block-producing Solana validator to help participate in network stability.
With such a key enterprise in tech backing Solana, this is exactly what is needed at a network level to help ensure longevity and prevent on-chain outages. While this may drive the network to a more centralized state for the time being, this will help aid people building projects on Solana over the long haul, as well as help ensure sustainability during hyped launches that might previously have crashed the network.
A Future Prediction
Solana is primed to be the chain of the next generation. If it can get enough adequate growth towards some of the more exciting projects, these tech upgrades have potential to reshape the way people use apps. The benefit of added user experience and high TPS also bodes well in the building of digital identity and social media platforms. There a few investor tools, job portals and project hubs building some very unique platforms for future web3 adoption and expansion.
The addition of sub-streams by The Graph gives dApp developers open source accessibility to extract and interpret on-chain data to feed their applications. While this adds more developer traffic to the Solana ecosystem, Google Cloud also introduced node hosting support for builders including Cloud Armor Solutions that prevent Nodes from DDoS attacks following what was mentioned above.
My Bullish Call
I don’t think it would be far off to say that Solana might have new apps released in the Google Play Apps & Games Team in the near future, considering FTX — Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange is already available with US restrictions. There is a public repository launched on Git Hub for developers wanting to build using the Solana Mobile Stack, and Coral has already raised $20 million to build the first iPhone of Crypto.
With ReactxNFT being a developer tool engineered using one of the worlds most widely adopted JavaScript libraries, the opportunities are truly just beginning allowing an easier transition for app developers to start testing blockchain integrations. So buckle up friends, Solana isn’t going anywhere, even if all the scammers brought the rugs over to the Aptos chain.
Ca-Caw and Gn.
With love,
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