Stadium Gates #12
What a Difference a Year Makes
Did that really happen?
Was it all a dream?
To The Launchpad
Did That Really Happen?
If you were into crypto, Web3, NFTs, the metaverse, or any of the frontier technologies during the last five years, then you may be in the stage of our journey that’ll make you wonder if you should scrub your resume of references to “GM” and “WAGMI” and move back to the city and take that nice job in a real office slinging insurance for your rich uncle; OR, or, orrrrrrrr, maybe you’re stoked. Maybe this is the phase of the journey you have been waiting for and have already set to the task of building something that NEEDS to be built. We need a dapp for that, of course.
What we have all just passed through during the last two years was, indeed, what it was like when the “Internet” exploded onto the scene at the turn of the century. The media frenzy, the bubble, the shilling of questionable IPOs, exploitive rug pulls, the over promising, the deceitful stock pumps by talking heads and journalists, and the general burning of mountains of cash all happened in the regulated markets during the DOTCOM craze from ‘99-’01. And…it felt just like what the blockchain believers are feeling right now. It hurt, and it was scary, but it was also a flashpoint from which the world became widely connected. It was all necessary to move on from the information age to the connected age. Excitement and investment were necessary to stairstep human productivity, and so it happened. We burned what needed to be burned, and we found a way to buy iPhones and build apps.
If you had the foresight, or fortune, to be ‘in’ crypto/web3/blockchain during any point of this most recent crypto cycle, then you have just earned whatever goodness comes your way when “the line goes up” during the next cycle. Your normie friends will think you were lucky, and you’ll be offended by that characterization, because you put in the work to feel some pain to learn what needed to be learned. No amount of effort will help to clearly explain your conviction about the technology in 2022, or 2017, 2013, or 2010. You had to have been there (here), and you were one of the few million people to jump in and earn some dents in your helmet. Congratulations, you have seen the early flames burn up close.
Was it All a Dream?
I recently completed my “internship” with OneOf.com. I had the time of my life with these folks and was able to participate in some of the most notable NFT drops of 2022, from the inaugural Grammy Awards offering, to working on the drops of sports greats Wayne Gretzky and Muhammad Ali. Musicians are core to our business, and we dropped Doja Cat and the genesis NFT for Biggie Smalls. We caught the wind with this timing and gained the fullest experience of the market cycle, so it’s outstanding timing to move our attention back to the side projects for Stadium Gates. Sometimes ya get burned, sometimes ya get bounced. Both give you time to build.
This is my ThankYouX grail from The Grammy Awards collection. You can find more information about the artist here…
Biggie, Biggie, Biggie…
As a follow-on to the opportunity I had to help drop the Biggie Smalls NFT collection, I have recently been voted as one of the five inaugural council members for The Sky’s the Limit Collective, which will oversee the DAO for holders of the Biggie Smalls NFT. The council is composed of council members from the base of holders of the NFT project, which is quite an honor for me as a fan of Biggie and his legacy. Our charter is to represent the DAO in its decisions regarding the use of Biggie’s famous Fulton Street Freestyle, which holds the exclusive license to the use of the work and will govern the usage of all proceeds generated from the property. You can find the YouTube version here…
We are in the formative stages of building this collective, and I will share its progress in future newsletters. It’s a surreal turn of events to join this council and have the opportunity to put Biggie’s legacy on a path to landing on Mars, or to at least revisit Fulton Street in the metaverse.
Edition #2500 ranked #868 for rarity. It’s not the most rare of my collection, but it has many qualities I dig, including a clean edition number and a palindrome rarity rank.
To the Launchpad
Did I bury the lead? I sure did.
The best thing to do during a bear market is to build, and that’s what we’re doing. Immutable Type is now in development and is planned to deploy in its beta state during Q4 2022.
As a refresher, Immutable Type will be a protocol for journalism to rebuild as a trusted resource of information for this generation of News consumers. Reference this prior newsletter to dive deeper into the background, but, in short, the premise is our current media climate is bereft of trust from the lack of aligned incentives. “Blockchain solves this” is appropriate here.
The beta iteration of Immutable Type will feature AI images that will be generated by using the text of traditional media headlines as the prompt input. We are making these free-to-mint for users holding any Ethereum wallet, so all any user will need to do is simply pay the gas fees to mint the image as an NFT for their collection. Early supporters will be able to accumulate our earliest NFT drops from the new Immutable Type marketplace and display their collection in an Immutable Type profile, or resell on third-party marketplaces of their choosing. The plan is to publish new NFT drops weekly to represent the prior week’s traditional News headlines. The edition quantity will be capped to maintain exclusivity for early supporters.
Using traditional media headlines as inputs to our AI to generate image outputs strikes me as gleefully compelling. While the future state of Immutable Type will support and publish exclusive journalistic works, photography and art, the earliest phase will create derivative works from traditional media representations of our world. This, for me, is one of the most fundamental examples of how we may examine existing media biases. The machine is going to output whatever we feed it. This is going to be fun, I hope.
Here is an early example of our AI image generated from a prompt collected from a traditional media headline. Headline text: Dollar robust as Fed headlines big week for central banks.
Blastoff
It’s an exciting time to be building Immutable Type, as we’ve been working toward the launchpad for quite some time. I think this is perfect timing, as the hype cycle has come to an immediate halt (thankfully), and we have another year of learning under our belts to prioritize the next 18 months more effectively. We are in the middle of some concerning world events at this moment, and the U.S. has a presidential election coming in 2024, so I am looking to hustle and add value wherever we are able to do so during these events.
The initial rollout will include an Immutable Type Telegram group, as well as the accompanying newsletter for the project. I will follow with the beta launch of ImmutableType.com in the third week of November, 2022, and then a build-build-build effort until we reach exit velocity.
Thank you for subscribing. We have a lot to accomplish. We’re talking off.