Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

On this episode, I’m joined by Luke (aka @worm_emoji) and Adam Ludwin, co-founders of Context. Our conversation focuses on mint.fun, their nft mint aggregator. Mint.fun is the best place to see what’s minting right now. The site prominently features a list of the NFT collections that have been minted on the most in the last hour on Ethereum. The site generates mint buttons at every popular price point for all ERC721 and 1155 collections that are not yet sold out.

Luke, Adam and I discuss their observations since creating the project, future product design ideas, and perspective on the future of NFT primary sales. Jacob Frantz from First Mate drops in jam on NFT mint analytics.

I was excited host Luke and Adam, who are building some of the hottest social NFT experiments in the world right now. It’s a privilege to be able to speak with builders about their current projects as they invent them. I hope you enjoy the show.

Topics Discussed

- Meeting each other at Byte

On this episode I’m joined by Jasper and Thomas, the co-founder developers of Arcadia Finance. Arcadia is a forthcoming lending protocol whose modular contract architecture will allow users to deposit any onchain asset into a user-controlled vault, and withdraw a credit line against it. Arcadia lets users combine several types of collateral into a single basket, and for loans to be borrowed against the cumulative value of the vault. A vault could contain NFTs, fungibles, and future asset types that have yet to be invented. Jasper and Thomas explain how this architecture allows for risk diversification and even more sophisticated funding strategies in the future.

I had an exciting conversation with Jasper and Thomas.

Topics Discussed

• Lido Staked ETH vs Rocket Pool staked ETH 

On today’s episode, I’m joined by Wijuwiju and Anna who are building Interface, a human readable social web3 feed. At the time of recording, Interface is an iOS and Android app that lets you follow wallets and scroll through an infinite feed of their recent activity. It’s a great way to see recent swaps, mints, and transfers, and over time the team is developing richer indexing and transaction parsing, to show things like Snapshot votes, Mirror blog posts, and their most recent feature, Gnosis multisig signatures.

Anna and Wiju describe how they found their passion for decentralization, their process for fundraising and building web3 apps in public, and their long-term plans for building a sustainable public goods DAO that generates revenues for token holders. This is a great team and an episode not to be missed.

Topics Discussed

- Wijuwiju learned about crypto through Juan Benet and found the decentralized, anti-censorship enabling properties interesting. He started with Bounties for Balance wallet, writing Uniswap Letters and working on Doin Gud NFT market.

In this throwback episode, I’m joined by Oliver Zerhusen, Decentralized Governance coordinator at Graph Advocates (previously Graph Protocol), and Ross Campbell, legal engineer at LexDAO and KaliDAO.

In this episode, Oliver explains how The Graph’s $GRT tokenomics incentivize subgraph indexing and how The Graph’s 4 core teams are organized. Ross explains why it’s so hard to work with lawyers, and we explore cool DAO related contracts like Radicle Drips, DictatorDAO, Aragon Optimistic Governance, and Moloch’s concept of the Ragequit.

Topics discussed:

In this episode, I’m joined by three voices in the ETH liquid staking space. WalshyNFG works on business development at Lido, Crews works on product and growth at Index Coop, and Leo Glisic is a blockchain watcher who is active on Twitter.

This episode is all about Lido Staked ETH, Index Coop’s leveraged icETH, and more.

Topics discussed:

On today's episode I'm joined by Peter Kieltyka, CEO of Horizon Games, creators of blockchain trading card game Skyweaver, Jamal Raees, Blockchain Strategy Head at Wyre, and Craig Lou, Project Manager at Wyre. This episode is all about Smartramp, Wyre's new fast fiat onramp, and how its enabling more players to get started playing Skyweaver. Smartramp is an API that lets people interact with EVM smart contract functions directly from a Credit Card transaction.

We also discuss Horizon's Sequence smart contract wallet, and Niftyswap, their ERC-20 to ERC-1155 AMM DEX.

The conversation opens with a recap of the Curve wars and the fascinating relationship between yield emission governance tokens and staking aggregators like Convex. The conversation then turns to veBanny, the work-in-progress staked Juicebox ($JBX) token and the many intriguing designs active contributors are considering.

Topics Discussed

· @Mr__Goldstein - Juicebox Contributor

· Juicebox - A programmable treasury for community-owned Ethereum projects

· @squarishbread -FinTech PM and defi thinker https://teachmehowtodefi.substack.com/

In this episode, I'm joined by Devan Non, Ape Dev, and Jiran for a fascinating discussion all about NFT MEV. MEV, or Maximum Extractable Value, is the value that can be extracted from block production in excess of block rewards and transaction fees. Two of today's guests, Devan Non and Ape Dev, are a professional MEV searcher team. They observe the mempool to find arbitrage opportunities that they can act upon for profit. In this very special episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain, they reveal their techniques for NFT MEV and explain why they've decided to return to fungible MEV. Blockchain sleuth and etherscan expert Jiran lends his domain expertise to deepen this exploration of the NFT MEV landscape.

It's extremely rare to hear MEV operators discuss their techniques. I was especially grateful for the opportunity to speak with today's guests. I hope you enjoy the show.

Hosted by @nnnnicholas

Produced by @0xmatthewb and @0xbrileigh

00:01:35 What is MEV

00:03:47 MEV scene

00:04:50 MEV risk and strategy

00:07:30 Arbitrage opportunities on marketplaces

00:09:30 Botting hyped drops

00:14:26 Flashmint, the difference between MEV and trading

00:18:20 Types of botting at different stages of an NFT project pipeline

00:21:21 Devan Non saving gas and flashbots

00:27:00 Manipulating the market

00:29:24 Tools for MEV

00:34:10 What is Flashmint

00:40:54 Market making

00:49:25 Devan Non’s favourite NFTs

00:55:05 MEV on other chains

00:55:46 Ape Dev and Devan Non working in Ethereum before MEV

01:00:52 MEV culture

01:10:30 Drifter

In this episode, I'm joined by @remnynt, creator of onchain NFT collections vibes.art and the reliquary. We chat about remnynt’s background as a mobile game dev, his transition into generative NFT art, and the influence of Artblocks, Terraforms, and Corruptions on his practice. We dive into vibes.art, his first on-chain Javascript based collection, and the reliquary his latest creation, which combines his interest in on-chain generative art and fantasy RPGs.

I've never seen anyone use source code to tell a story in the way today's guest has. It was great chatting with remnynt about games, art, life, and code. I hope you enjoy the show.

Hosted by @nnnnicholas

Produced by @0xmatthewb and @0xbrileigh

00:01:40 remnynt’s past experience

00:05:00 Facebook games audience?

00:06:20 remnynt’s entry to NFTs

00:07:53 Vibes.art contract

00:11:30 Vibes.art process and colour theory

00:13:18 Prints in genesis collection

00:14:28 Open Vibes

00:15:40 Math for creating gradients and textures

00:17:43 Vibes contract deploy

00:19:00 [the reliquary]

00:22:10 remnynt’s connection with Earthbound

00:24:18 Built-in controls in [the reliquary]

00:25:43 Save your drawing permanently

00:27:09 Transmuting your Relic

00:29:00 Jolteon

00:30:21 Contact lore and growing the project

00:33:49 Imagine colours & upgrading

00:37:00 integrating randomness on-chain

00:38:52 Relic updates

00:41:50 Playing to earn and playing for pleasure

In this episode, I’m joined by solidity devs w1nt3r and Tyler Angert to talk about button.lol, watchfaces.world, and onchain SVG.

Button.lol is a website with a single button that holders on the optimism network can click once every 6 hours to collect points.

watchfaces.world is an on-chain SVG time piece NFT collection. Each NFT is customizable at mint time and will forever display the current time through the use of on-chain SVG rendering. While telling the story of watchefaces world, w1nt3r also tells me how he built an on-chain hot reloading SVG which is helping on-chain SVG devs tighten the visualization prototyping loop for new collections.

Hosted by @nnnnicholas 

Produced by @0xmatthewb and @0xbrileigh

0:00:00 Intro

0:01:10 Winter and Loot Rings project

00:03:45 The story of watchfaces

00:05:40 Developer Productivity Tooling made for watchfaces

00:06:19 What is watchfaces world

00:08:15 developing tooling on-chain vs using p5.js or other language libraries

00:12:16 Building hot re-loading SVG’s from a solidity contract

00:19:10 Upgrades to the second collection

00:19:32 Re-engraving the watches

00:23:51 High end watches valuation

00:25:25 Tyler’s Watch collecting experience

00:27:00 Craftsmanship under old luxury car engines → link?

00:30:05 Biograph Girl and cinema in North America in 1910’s

00:35:30 SourceCred

00:36:30 Button.lol