The Future PROOF Reveal and Road Ahead  What a way to underpromise and overdeliver. I think a lot of FUD and doubt was squashed with the Future PROOF presentation. It really set the tone for the year of building ahead and what this means in real tangible product development (not just more fanny packs… sorry Justin :-P). There was a ton of stuff presented so much I won’t go into it but you should especially to better understand the new NFT called Mythics and how the drop mechanics for this NFT will work and a demo of what Highrise will look like.  Proof of Conference  One of the biggest topics discussed was PROOF of Conference, a Multi-day celebration of web3; it will include Art exhibitions, IRL mint experiences (if you have been following what the folks at brightmoments.io have been doing, you know what this means), and talks from leading stakeholders in the space and Interest-based social events between community members. The event is going to be at Skylight Row DTLA on May 11-13 2023. There are some hotels rates locked for holders, these go live on November 18 2022 at the ProofOfConference.xyz website.   Who gets in? PROOF Collective members will be receiving a VIP pass for free. Moonbirds and Oddities have discounted passes and first access when tickets go live in January.   Data and Research  Hiring NFTstatistics.eth (also known as @punk9059) as Director of Research was an incredible decision as we have seen proven by the first 4 Deep Dives published on Music NFTs, royalties and other topics and contributions to the podcast too.   European Tour  Berlin, London, Paris, the team enjoyed some facetime with the community in various cities in Europe. Kevin got to finally meet XCOPY and the images and videos just gave a ton of FOMO to those who couldn’t come.   IRL events is now core to the PROOF mission as Kevin mentioned in one of the townhalls that being able to scale and incentivize via the Proof token or other way for the community to meet was something they were looking for.   Gold nests baby!!!  I was incredibly excited for the Gold Nest rewards, this was an incredibly thoughtful reward, each Moonbird holder got a custom Infinite Objects digital frame with an animated version of their birds.  Check the unboxing video on Twitter, for more info.   The DAO and Proof of Documentation  If you haven’t checked the Proof of Documentation at docs.proof.xyz please do, it has a ton of info in a single place and it is the best place to understand the official mission of the Moonbirds DAO.   What is the DAO you ask? The DAO was created to: “empower creatives to further the Moonbirds ecosystem, reputation, and lore. We believe this will lead to new products, NFT collections, companies, cultural moments and content — with the intention of elevating the Moonbirds brand and eventually making it a household name.”  The DAO will be funded by an initial capital infusion in ETH, NFTs and a rolling royalty piece from second market sales of Moonbirds in marketplaces.   I’m really excited for this as there is a large amount of community members who have incredible ideas that with a little bit of capital can go a long way for the brand.   Art Basel in Miami - Proof meetup and Subparliaments Event  As part of the LosLatinBirds community I’m super excited for this meetup and will be in Miami for it. There’s a Dec 1 meetup at Dante’s HiFi for many Subparliaments including Los LatinBirds, NudeBirds and others. There’s also a Proof Day Lounge on Dec 2 at Doya. More info at events.proof.xyz   That’s it for now, see you in Miami or Los Angeles birbs!

The great dilemma of CC0 2022. A week back Kevin did the very fast moving change in policy that Moonbirds art would be CC0 moving forward. This is only the art not the trademark. This had the community split right down the middle. The main complaints were that: The change was introduced too fast and without warning. This lead some holders who had licensing deals in progress to lose out on 6 figure checks. “I’m looking at you Lakoz”. This could have been done for future collections like Ravens. So buyers would know ahead of buying what the terms were. On the other side many designers and holder thought the release was great. There’s a narrative that the more the art of a collection gets out there via derivatives, the more that value gets added to the main collection. This week we had a sneak audio only preview of future proof and wow was it loaded with stuff. I recommend checking out the recording on discord for those that are holders or the summary thread by @bennyhsu_xyz for more details but here’s my take: 

-Highrise - my own explanation of what highrise will look like is like this: Close your eyes, imagine  “a fancy, futuristic, enhanced-reality, time-shared and co-op, art gallery concept in the middle of wall street”. That is what I see. A place where you own a little bit of the floor (or wall space) where you can showcase your collections, a place where you can see other collections and where the creators are always online so you can see interviews/videos/audio clips of them and of the art you are looking at. But also a place where quant butlers hangout and can help you with any analytics and insights into any piece or artist in the gallery. They also have a microbrewery on the back and great music/ambiance. 

-The DAO - just like any other will help with proposals and funding of new collabs.  But with great DAO comes great token which is what some hodlers are excited for. *shrug* “Deploying capital to community endeavors is great but if you’re not helping these things with team resources and project management then it may not work out… We want to hire people so these projects can get support and help them get launched”.

-Moonbirds - What is the goal of Moonbirds? “What are we trying to accomplish? It’s to be a big part of culture and have mainstream awareness and adoption.”

-Ravens - “We are thinking about expansions but not charging for it. Nor is it time to dilute the market with a lot of NFTs.”

-Oddities - When i hear there’s a decision we will need to make I think a “bored ape serum-like” event is coming. I mentioned this before and do think that will be the future of it. It also follows and matches the velocity mindset KRO was referring to when he said he didn’t wanted to flood the market. “We see there’s a community around Oddities. But there will be a direct tie in with Moonbirds expansion. As a holder, you will have a decision you have to make.”

-Nesting - More “surprises” ahead but slow your roll folks. Stay nested my friends. “There is a reason why birds nest. They sit on nests because they hatch things, and it doesn’t all happen on the same day.” 

-Data - I can’t wait for Future PROOF and @punk9059 to take the stage to talk about deep dive reports and analytics. 

Grails II - If you hold a PROOF pass or acquired a mint pass in secondary you were able to mint the Grails II project. The dynamics, conspiracy theories and FOMO this generated is just wild. Some artists are known (or at least we have a good idea), others are brand new. At 3ETH floor prize this should be an easy flip to 3x for those who don’t care about the art. For those that do, i think this will be a great start in your collectors journey if not already there. Me personally I like Grails 5 and 17. 

The team has done a great deal of reflection. What they expected was that not ALL holders of Moonbirds would have nested and that we would have a couple dozen or hundreds birds reaching the gold nest level. Reality is that almost all holders nested from day 1 and aren’t un-nesting. Now the team has a rolling 8k eligible recipients for rewards hitting on the same day and this very quickly adds up. As KRO said, “I rather spend $1MM in 5 engineers who will help us push product development years into the future than sending merch to that many holders”. And this was honestly great to hear. I personally prefer more work on Highrise and Grails projects than meetings around Cotopaxi fanny pack color selection. The date is now 8/30 for Future PROOF, this is the meeting where the public will peak into the roadmap much deeper;  as promised we’ll see a bit more of what Highrise will actually be.   Which leads to a comment on those fanny packs. Justin knew they were going to be controversial; like Pineapple on Pizza, you either Love it or Hate it. Justin loved them and they moved forward as they didn’t want what is common like branded Hoodies. But after that community reception they are more aware that when making controversial choices it might be best to leave options to the recipients. A quote from the team “if something in the future might have a strong opinion, maybe give options“. We’ll see what this means for Gold nest level in a few weeks.   When asked about access to content ahead of the public, KRO mentioned this is something they want to ask the PROOF pass holders. They currently get this and 4 days is a tangible edge in the NFT world. They will report back but are open to it.   As mentioned last week when we discussed the disappointing part of the oddities reveal is that these were paired to their Moonbird (including the rarity) but when asked this week if there was any benefit for holders to have their matching oddities and Moonbird the answer was No.   There will be more merch at propaganda.xyz in the future this won’t be the same merch as nesting levels though. Team talked about Tyler Hobbs and how fun it is to have him and artists doing live sessions at events but also said he’s too busy to be part of Grails 2. So No PROOF Fidenzas for us folks :-P    More townhalls are expected, the whole team listens to these and will help steer the direction as feedback is discussed.

Weekly Parliament:   After the Events Coordinator hire last week this week we’ll hear about additional hiring on the data analysts side. Hopefully we’ll see this content into podcasts and other assets in the near future.   Grails 2 is coming; PROOF holders will benefit but also Moonbird holders with Grails cup on top of their head will have a chance at mint passes. The rest of us humans will need to buy the pass on secondary to get in. No news on artists yet for Grails; except for Tyler Hobbs not being one of those (as mentioned in the Townhall).   The team will be sending (on Discord) an anonymous survey soon to listen in to more feedback from the community.   The team is excited for more IRL events and how they can support the community and subparliaments to create more. An example is an “LA Moonbirds Meetup in Silverlake this week organized by @brianyooner”. The team has also confirmed their attendance to Art Basel in Miami this December and will be sharing details soon for those who want to be able to book travel soon.

The biggest chunk of time from Parliament this week was spent talking to the recipients of the Oddities giveaways. The amazing @akaStevey did all the amazing work researching and selecting the recipients and we are incredibly happy to see that list.   1: @unicorndao_xxx 2: @50mmCollective 3: @Blackatxyz 4: @humanDAO 5: @0xDecaArt 6: @MyBFF 7: @endaomentdotorg

It was a crazy event filled week. If you didn't witness it live, you missed a ton. So first we had oddities dropping on Wednesday. It was crazy what was happening with the floor, lots of activity, lots of people expecting, you know, I don't know what they were expecting.  Lots of high expectations when the drop came. Some people were a bit disappointed because rarity really seemed to be tied to your Moonbird. So the, the oddity spawned from the Moonbird.  the traits sort of transferred to it. It was very little new traits that were not part of the Moonbird that translated to the oddity.  So that means if you already own a rare moon bird, then you own a rare oddity. And I think that was the biggest disappointment from folks. The art was really cool. We have nothing bad to say about Gremplin, but, um, maybe a little shuffle in that rarity. Would've made it. Uh, a bit of a, an interesting, more reveal, but the reveal party was fun.  The call was fun. I think people, uh, enjoyed seeing some of their oddities and now we have more people joining the community that bought oddities that week that are now able to join the discord and participate in things that they couldn't before. So props to the team on that drop, they did say "if we had to do it all over again, we probably would do this as a surprise airdrop with an instant reveal. So think about that. That might be the future for, uh, what comes next. Now what else we had this week? We had the silver nest. Um, the only word I have to say is "Fanny packs"?  Apparently this was the talk of the town in NFT.NYC lots of people were looking for Fanny packs. I don't know. I wasn't there.  I really wish I was, but I wasn't there. Um, what comes out of this is apparel doesn't seem to be cutting it with everybody. I think some people really enjoy the fanny packs. We enjoy the choices the team made in terms of the company they're made by Cotopaxi really environmentally and sustainable organization.  But at the same time, um, we just kind remind folks that these are some really fun drops of some really cool merch that are happening along the way. So it was not an airdrop of a token. It was not another NFT. It was, it was apparel and it was merch. And I think that is serving the community a little bit to help people reset their expectations and understand that, Hey, we're in this for the long run.  If you don't understand what the biggest utility, I think the team has delivered to everyone is security.  So Saturday, July 23rd, we had a fake website that came out saying, Hey, go here. So you can burrow AKA nest, your oddity. There were tons of people that sadly thought that was a legit website and lost all of their NFTs in their wallet.  They got drained and that's something that we really need to go back and think. Like, what is the biggest benefit that we've gotten from the PROOF company? And it really has been security. It really has been the ability that a lot of people have not had their NFT drained because they're nesting the ability for people to feel, you know, more secure and just relaxed.  Uh, that's something that has tons of value and it continues helping the community. So if you forget, what's the biggest thing you got; not losing your NFT is probably one of the single. Benefits from this community. So that's it for this week. We're hopeful and looking to what's coming up ahead. Uh, December's gonna be crazy with Art basel in Miami.

In this week’s Parliament we got to see KRO’s marketing genius again as he FOMO’ed the heck out of the oddities Gremplin art.   

Youtube: https://youtu.be/O0Liy5x3SHQ

Newsletter: https://moonbirdspod.substack.com/p/acquisitions-less-than-a-week-to?sd=pf

Acquisitions:   

The biggest piece of news this week was the acquisition of the Divergence Team (Harri And Arran).   

"Team Divergence has been acquired and now full time with @proof_xyz. Arran will be joining as VP of Engineering. Harri will be joining as Director of Product Management"  

In case you aren’t grasping how big this is, it is HUGE! And why is that? Because Divergence is one of the best ERC-721A Dev teams in the world. Divergence is at the very forefront of what technology allows us do in Web3 (ahem… nesting); and PROOF stealing this team for themselves sets back many other teams who would normally hire Divergence considerably.   

This was even recognized by Alexis Ohanian in Twitter which was nice to see.   

There has never been a time Kevin has come to them with an idea and they've never said it's impossible.  

Oddities is less than a week away:  

Wednesday July 20th at 9:00AM PDT is when we’ll see the full reveal. The team will have a “Reveal party” for holders to share the art at that time. It’s unclear if this will be inside the discord server os some other platform like YouTube or Zoom.   

OdditTEASE   

On Sunday morning we saw Pre-Reveal art in the metadata. Check our Twitter feed to learn how to see what kind of pre-reveal art you got too.   

Silver Nests on Thursday  

And to top it all off Thursday marks the next nesting milestone. We don’t know what to expect, could this be hoodies for hooded birbs or something beyond apparel merch? We don’t know but we are definitely excited.   

More Trait Based Art Drops - Rubberduckz  

There are 92 Moonbird holders who just received a BYORD NFT.   @RubberduckzNFT: QUACK HOOT! @moonbirds holders with a Rubber Duck trait, just got a BYORD NFT airdropped. BYORD (Build Your Own Rubber Duck) is a customizable collection with more than 450 hand-drawn new traits. Hatch it in the Incubator to create a final BYORD NFT. https://byord.xyz   

Discord Reorg   

This week there was a big Re-org of the Discord. As KRO said it seems every 6 months or so every Discord admin has to prune and re-org discord servers as the needs of communities change fast. We really like the new structure, it is easier to navigate.   

Communities and Sub-Parliaments  

One of the changes in the Discord server is also the addition of Private threads for Sub-Parliaments based on traits and other communities. I’m excited for this as it will allow for easier coordination of IRL events, DAOs and more. I’m personally excited for the @Los Latin Birds community and what may happen in Miami at Art Basel as some of the Proof members have said they expect to be there in December.   

That’s it for now, fun week head birbs; see you in a week.

We now have a newsletter!  Subscribe here: https://moonbirdspod.substack.com/  

Listen to us at moonbirdspodcast.xyz    

Watch the Video at: https://youtu.be/NpVhZ03Nbns 

This is a 2 week wrap-up of Moonbirds activity. (Sorry folks I was out celebrating the 4th with the family last week)  

First let's address the bird in the room or should I say: RAVENS!   

If you are wondering what this is... Well it was leaked on Discord that PROOF (the company) had registered a Trademark Application with the United States Patent Office. This lead to two things happen this week #1) the floor pumped... bigly! And #2) KRO had to jump on Discord and explain what this was about to calm down the excitement and wild ideas that escalated quickly within the Moonbirds Lounge Channel.   

Let's talk Product Updates:   1) https://nest.moonbirds.xyz/feeds/twitter Check our the new Twitter Feed feature that makes #BirdFollowBird easier to do.   2) Oddities - The date is July 20th and we are less than 2 weeks away from the Gremplin Drop. I quote: Oddities will be a"Fun and wild and quirky experience. The art is really unique. " Is it just art or is it more, what will the roadmap will hold we don't know yet. I know some friends who were considering flipping before reveal as it is statistically common for NFT Floors to drop post-reveal. I'm personally holding for dear life and I can't wait for the drop.   Another note on Oddities is that when the drop happened (earlier in the year) there were 400 birds at that time that were un-nested and returned to the PROOF Treasury. Quote from the Moonbirds account: "We're taking these additional pellets and putting together a distribution plan to get them out to a diverse set of collectors -- women, people of color, and underrepresented groups." (Shameless Plug) One of the communities I'm part of is the @LosLatinBirds and I'm hoping we can get some Oddities to distribute to amazing Latino artists and builders in the Web3 space.   

One of the themes this week was Builder highlights, and the Parliament took some time to talk about PhrazeBoard by @phrazeart. If you haven't check it out please do as one of the prizes in this NFT Treasure Hunt is a PROOF pass which at the time of recording have an 84 ETH Floor.   

There were quite a few more shoutouts in the Parliament. One of those was  @endaomentdotorg and some of the Amazing work they are doing on Crypto Philanthrophy. The other shoutouts were the Healthy Birds at (wehealthybirds.xyz) and the @LosLatinBirds also got a shoutout and KRO and @akaStevey already said they would be coming to our meetup in MIAMI this year at Art Basel. I can't wait!   

Some Community Questions this week were again around a token. To which the team said and i quote: "If people buy your NFTs cause of the potential upside of a token then it can be classified as a financial instrument which we are not. ". One great insight KRO had was that: If you do hear of other NFT companies talking about tokens, be careful as this probably means they haven't even talked to a lawyer yet.   

That’s it for this week birds. Talk soon.

This is a short week of updates for those who didn't get to attend all the NFT.NYC parties. So what's the recap?  Kevin and Justin got Moonbirds tattoos at the party. Now that is conviction!   There was a giant Moonbird with Flames coming out of its heat in NYC that looked sick!   David Blaine sewed his lips shut at the party for the crowd, yikes.   Tyler Hobbs did some live coding and the attendees got to listen to great music and drinks.   The ladybirds brunch seemed like a legit chill, intimate and fun event, props to @MoonbirdsWomen for organizing it.   At the event Kevin was recorded saying: “The next 60 days are going to be nuts for you all” -  specifically talking about Oddities, the Gremplin drop and the next nest level.     One last thing from Community moderator Benny: One of the free swag items tonight was a keychain. Quote: “The mint is the beginning. Moonbirds are the key.” Is that A hint of what’s to come? We'll see.   And that's it for the week for those like me who couldn't attend NFT.NYC I'll see you all at PROOF Con next year.   Bonus, we spotted Alexis Ohanian's Instagram story wearing his Moonbirds cap.   

Video Courtesy of: twitter.com/gulo6969

 Is PROOF the next Three Arrows Capital?  No. The team meets regularly with other Web3 builders, including Alexis Ohanian and his 776 Team and have adopted the industry standard to swap out enough ETH for stablecoin (not UST ;-)) to cover for taxes, salaries, and operational expenses for the next 3 years; that seems like a healthy runway. The rest is in ETH as the team is obviously long on ETH.  

Product updates: dark mode has arrived. This week more stats and more metrics on nesting and holders were also launched.

What's up ahead; as Justin put it, we are "adding colors and personality to your collector's profiles". Kevin hinted at ways to show oddities and other drops inside your profile page and mockups reviewed this week of features that will help birbs follow similar birbs. 

An easier way to find more private parliaments maybe? If I had to guess, I would say this will look similar to what @hermanschutte, a community member, has done with leaderbird.xyz. Personally, I really like what curio.tools (another Alexis Ohanian 776 investment btw), it's doing. Their Moonbirds traits dashboard is pretty cool; in my opinion. 

The team also hinted at other ways to access your nesting dashboard that aren't using your ledger.  Something like login with Google or similar might be on the way. 

Oddities update: The Oddities clock is ticking.

Oddities give you access to the PROOF Discord server and Oddities channels. The reveal happens in about 30 days, (Oddities.xyz); the first Oddities artist is going to be Gremplin.

Oddities are like "ant tunnels in an ant hill" they burrow.  Oddities are gonna be a fun way for the team to do more yearly drops of funky artists like Gremplin, but they don't really Nest like Moonbirds do. 

If you haven't listened to the latest PROOF podcast episode. Danny Yang from OnChainMonkey talks about his new NFT project and the mechanics of desserts. Similar to bored ape serum. Maybe at some point, we'll see Oddities be something that you can burn or consume and you'll get a second NFT, who knows?

NFT.NYC: there's a lot more events happening in New York this week. Check out events.proof.xyz for the official company events. Also there's a new section for community events. 

(Fidenzas, anyone?) Tyler Hobbs, who is known for his beautiful generative art collections is gonna be live coding at the main event, in addition to all the music, open bar and the David Blaine magic.

Kevin is a true David Blaine fanboy. Justin takes a lot of pleasure in teasing him about this. I think the magic theme is much better than Justin's idea of renting an actual pirate ship for NFT.NYC though. 

Kevin talked about trait specific merch, like little martial arts headbands that you can buy, and also the hoodies for the hooded birbs. Hopefully at some point,  community merch can also be shown on the website. 

akaStevey said the team is watching and seeing what the community is building. Similar to Benny whose parliament notes we have used in this podcast, and got him the role of moderator on the Discord server. Congrats, Benny! There are others worthy of mention like @vxtxr_eth with his daily Twitter nesting updates and @hermanschutte with Leaderbird

Episode Notes:  

Even after more tickets were released many couldn't get a ticket. There will be a waitlist line for those with a tokenproof waitlist ticket. There's 1k spots for this I'm personally on this list. Kevin and crew will stop by the line to say hi for those. Hopeful everyone can get in but can't promise this.   

If you got a ticket but can't attend email [email protected] with your wallet address and let them know so someone else can get in.   

For Magic traits (witches and wizard) the private Magic party will be the next day 6/22 at the Little sister lounge and you can bring a +1 RSVPs closed on Friday 6/10 so if you didn't RSVP you may have missed the boat.   

The Ladybird brunch hosted by the Moonbirds Women twitter handle is sold out. Some cool branded ledgers will be handed out to some.   There is an un-official meetup on 6/20 at 4PM in Central Park next to the USS Maine monument. This is being hosted by @justanothermfer (who also hosts the nightowls twitter spaces).   

Stickers and Hats have begun to arrive. We don't have ours yet but can't wait! Many MB holders who want to remain anon asked if they can pickup their swag at the NFT.NYC event. This isn't possible but there will be extra hats and swag for attendees so you may be able to double dip if present.   

Discord channels have been re-organized. Let @akaStevey and @SodaPop know how do you like the new structure. Why no alpha channel? Because alpha channels lead to pump and dump schemes and the Moonbirds community isn't about that. It is about long term value not flipping.   

New PROOF Podcast episodes are out and also a new structure. The first episode features Maria Shen from Electric Capital and Derek Edwards from Collab+Currency in a discussion around the NOUNS DAO.   

As of recording there were 9629 nested birds from 6570 holders... How do i know? Because Global Stats are live on the website. Check them out.   

As always more HighRise building and Hiring from the team, some HighRise updates are almost ready but the team will talk about that more in the coming weeks.