Hi there,
How’s everyone doing? For our clouters in the states, we hope you enjoyed the day off and took time to commemorate and honor the many heroes who have died in service to our country. For the first time perhaps ever, the @BitsTODAY team will pass on the clout pun intros 🙏.
Our special ‘long-weekend’ recap today will go deep af on all the new UX drops, + a couple other updates on things we noted in yesterday’s issue and 1 bonus item beyond all that. Let’s drop anchor for a few minutes 🏴 ☠️ .
Guest cover design by @patrickassale
Today’s Clout Covered:
- BuzzClout:Exclusive look at today’s movers and shakers presented by @bitcloutsignal
- Ubiquitous UX Drops: A fire-hose of drops 🚒🚒🚒
- Wrapped Creator Coins: Bitclout blockchain → Ethereum blockchain
- @MillyTamati x @JakeUdell Update🤝: The givers that keep on giving
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout
First things first. In partnership with @bitcloutsignal, here’s an exclusive look at today’s movers and shakers:
#2 Ubiquitous UX Drops: A fire-hose of drops 🚒🚒🚒
Alrighttty folks. Last night was a verifiable fire hose of drops 🚒🚒🚒. We were trying to drink it all in and distill it for you at the time… at the minimum, we feel much better prepared to do so after some sleep, coffee, and a day off of work.
In quick summary:
- 1-click sign up with Google went live
- Buying $Bitclout with USD went live via Wyre (can confirm, we’ve loaded up 💰)
- Buy $Bitclout description line hints at a Bitclout-NFT marketplace (coming 🔜??)
- @diamondhands & co. are working on a way to transfer accounts between public keys
Let’s dive into all these a little deeper, shall we?
Last night, @diamondhands hit the global pinned post to announce the first two 💦 we listed above and to opine quickly on their impact:
This is certainly a huge step forward as far as promoting mainstream Bitclout adoption is concerned. All things considered, 2+ months into its existence, Bitclout is still small, with ~15,000–20,000 DAUs. To get to 6 or 7 figure DAUs someday, it definitely needed to be far more accessible than it was a mere few days ago, when you could only buy Bitclout with Bitcoin and new non-crypto native users encountered “seed phrases” for the first time.
As notes @hughjiang, the main ingredient still outstanding now is a proper off-ramp for users to convert $bitclout back into other currency, beyond the OTC offerings which already exist. As discussed in our Friday edition, we do think this is coming soon, as blockchain.com recently claimed the account @blockchain and started posting.
While the Wyre addition provides optionality, we would caution that much in the same way many users experienced significant transaction fees when first trying to use Bitcoin to buy Bitclout, this new USD-$bitclout on-ramp includes both transaction fees and a de-facto price hike. Remember, the formulaic price listed on Bitclout.com for $bitclout is 40–45% divorced from the economic rate at which $bitclout is being exchanged OTC (~$100). As pointed out by @tijn below, it’s more likely that $bitclout will list at a price closer to OTC rates when it does go live on an exchange, reflecting supply and demand rather than the original $bitclout pricing formula.
In short, the rate for $bitclout you’re getting when you buy with Wyre on Bitclout.com is at a steep premium to the rate you could be buying at in OTC markets. Proceed as you wish, you can consider that premium you’re paying patronage for @maebeam et all.
As far as the sign-up with Google functionality is concerned, we did wonder how the team would try to circumnavigate the fact that this new feature invariably poses some security vulnerability.
While we’re not exactly sure what @diamondhands meant by using a “Google Drive enclave to store your seed phrase,” we’re sure there’s still a non-zero risk of a Google Drive hack compromising seed phases, because that risk is always non-zero.
So we have to diverge from the party line a tiny bit here (😲). @diamondhands positioned this option for new users as largely mute as far as centralization concerns go. And yes, it’s just an option, not something baked into the Bitclout code. We’d like to respectfully push on this a bit still. Offering new users who don’t know any better a sign-up option that shares their seed phrase with a third-party doesn’t fully fit the ethos of decentralization in our eyes. But hey, we didn’t build Bitclout either! Carry on.
OK, more on points #3 and #4 that we outlined at the top of this section.
We don’t know much about the NFT marketplace yet. We just know that eagle-eyed 🦅🦅🦅 clouters (aka @tysonflows) spotted the addition of “buy NFTs (coming soon)” to the description of the ‘Buy Bitclout’ section on Bitclout.com.
That’s right, in case a new log-in option and fiat on-ramp wasn’t enough for you, there should soon be an integrated way to mint and sell NFTs on the Bitclout blockchain. At least that’s what we hope this means. While we wait for the roll-out, @dripcult might just be whipping up something tasty for the first ever BitsTODAY NFT 🥵. Stay tuned 👀👀👀
Last but not least, more eagle eyes also took the time to scroll through the 300+ comments on @diamondhands OG post, uncovering a smaller detail that came up in an interaction between 💎🙌 and @sidz:
This strikes us as another important innovation for non-native crypto users. We can attest to knowing a handful of people already who tried to get started on Bitclout pre-Google integration who didn’t save their seed phrase when they first opened their account and thus … didn’t get very far.
For some of us crypto heads, our response would likely be to shrug and say tough shit. But that’s likely not the way to scale DAU to 7 figures either 😂. We’re excited to see what the team whips up to help users backup and even transition their accounts and their $bitclout wealth.
#3 Wrapped Creator Coins: Bitclout blockchain → Ethereum blockchain
Another development that sits somewhere between UX, Bitclout economics, and innovation came from @0xJack this week. This one flew under the radar a bit, so we wanted to give it it’s due before we get lost in the sauce of another new week in the clout-iverse.
What’s @0xJack bringing to the table? A way to tokenize yourself on the Ethereum blockchain, not just on Bitclout.
While it’s worth reading @0xJack’s post on medium in full here, the gist of his innovation is that he created a separate creator coin ERC20 token on the ethereum blockchain, which is backed by a set amount of his Bitclout creator coins:
“I created an ERC20 token (BCLTjack) on the Ethereum blockchain that is backed by the BitClout creator coins of myself (jack_) that belong to me. I own 10.7197 jack_ BitClout creator coins, so I minted 107,197 BCLTjack ERC20 tokens”
Now, if you’re so inclined, you can transact in @0xJack on the Ethereum network via the BCLTjack tokens? The potential benefits here are myriad; those that come immediately to mind are that the Ethereum blockchain is as of yet much more liquid than Bitclout’s, and there’s all kinds of existing applications built on top of it that don’t exist for Bitclout yet. For instance, @0xJack was able to create BCLTjack token liquidity pools on the Ethereum blockchain, which of course isn’t really a thing on the Bitclout blockchain yet.
For a full deep dive on how @0xJack set this up (and how you can get involved), go check out the rest of @0xJack’s piece on medium and give him a follow!
#4 @MillyTamati x @JakeUdell Update🤝: The givers that keep on giving
Yesterday we wrote about the great work @MillyTamati and @JakeUdell are doing to champion emerging creators on Bitclout. Today, @MillyTamati kicked things off with a post she has as-of-yet been able to avoid deleting on accident 😉.
@JakeUdell has also kept up his end of the bargain, including whaling into some deserving creators, including the brilliant @ksenia_tree (recommended in these pages yesterday).
We can’t wait to see where this effort goes from here. 👏👏 There’s lots of week left for you emerging creators to enter the splash zone! And for any emerging creators who have already been blessed with @JakeUdell’s largesse, we’d love to hear from you too.
One last thing. Too busy with the holiday BBQ ribs to catch us on clubhouse tonight? No sweat, we got you. Tonight’s episode with @sourdough is live on Spotify! Listen to it here.
Thanks for spending some time with us this evening gang. We hope you’re feeling caught up and ready for what promises to be a MASSIVE week, what with #Miami going down and all.
Rest up, we’re all gonna need it,
@BitsTODAY
