Sign up for our free Substack HERE; we deploy every issue (& special features) there. Don’t have a Bitclout account yet? Create one here and get $10 for free!
Hi friends,
How we all doin’? Any blue checks out there almost spit out your coffee yesterday morning when your lil’ verification badge was gone for a few hours? 😂 That was a fun few hours. In other news, hope y’all aren’t sweating your crypto bags too much… as @ASG says… “Buy the dip watch it rip.” 📈 Not financial advice blah blah blah.
Anywho, let’s get on with it and talk BitClout business. Sound good? 👇
Bits on the menu tonight:
- BuzzClout: Exclusive updates from @bitcloutsignal & @bithunt ⚡️
- Ubiquitous UX drops: verification goes on vacation ✔️🏖️
- ope update 🛣️: the core team is also OOO… for now 🔜
- Moon markets: @BitCreatorCapital call it quits on creator coins 📉
- Project in focus 🔎: @CloutMegazord paves a secure path for teams to collab on BitClout 🤝👮
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout
Y’all know the drill by now. Let’s start by checkin’ in with @bitcloutsignal to see which creators were making the biggest moves in the past 24 hours:
Second up? As always, it’s the homies at @bithunt. Which community projects were on the go over the past 24? @bithunt has answers for us 💪:
#2 Ubiquitous UX drops: verification goes on vacation ✔️🏖️
There hasn’t been a ton of UX news hitting the wires this week so far. At least not in public — there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes on github, which we’ll explore. Still, the outward silence has been so deafening it led some folks to even wonder whether our lord and savior, @Maebeam, was still here? The answer is… ofc! And thank god for it 😌😇🥰.
And good thing too, because @Maebeam had some public-facing work to do, in addition to all the behind-the-scenes heroics we assume they’re up to 🦸♀️. Yesterday, clouters woke up to see that nearly all blue verification checkmarks, save for those that accompanied the 15,000 reserved profiles when BitClout first launched, were gone. Oh, the horror! Clouters quickly came up with running theories on wtf was going. Here’s what our favorite dev investigators were saying about the issue while it was still ongoing 🔍:
As it turns out, it was all just a pesky little bug of some sort 🐛. @Maebeam rode in on a white stallion to give all the blue checks clutching their pearls their badges back 😜. Lest there be any confusion, she’s still the head sheriff in town around here. Let’s give her some props, shall we 👏?
Does make you wonder what updates the core team is working on behind the scenes that might have led to this snag. An update to the verification process perhaps? 🤔 There were lots of folks who were actually kind of stoked to see the blue checkmarks removed for some time. It’s no secret that the verification process is… at best… sporadic. Maybe we’ll get more clarity on how that will work going forward soon.
Beyond the blue-tick scare, other devs are whirring away at important upgrades to the BitClout blockchain. @dgsus noted that @redpartyhat is preparing to push a big NFT update life, namely adding the ability to both burn (destroy) and transfer NFTs directly 🔥. This will be critical to bring BitClout NFTs out of the proverbial stone age to a place where they can be more competitive with NFTs on other chains, like Ethereum and Solana:
What else will we want to see for NFTs still? For one, more flexibility about setting up auctions would be nice. E.g., setting up an NFT auction to expire after 24 hours instead of running indefinitely. Scarcity + time-sensitivity = a big part of the reason NFTs on Ethereum & Solana are so hot rn🥵.
#3 Roadmap update 🛣️: the core team is also OOO… for now 🔜
In the above section, we discussed how there’s been growing murmurs around BitClout about how long we’ve gone without substantial updates from the core team. Last week, @Diamondhands’ hypeman @FastFreddie arrived on the scene to start pumpin’ us all up for gas on the fire and Phase 2 of BitClout ⛽🔥. It seems the core team has been heads down since then though, without making much in the way of public announcements about what’s coming or when to expect more news.
Today, @FastFreddie actually noted the team has been OOO, which wasn’t abundantly clear to us previously. Of course, many of them are clearly still working, as evidenced by updates we’ve already discussed in this issue so far. Still, this is good info to have. And they deserve it after the ~6 month run they’ve been on since BitClout launched in March 💆! Plus, based on what @FastFreddie is dishing, it sounds like the team is ready to get back in action:
At the risk of belaboring the roadmap milestones we expect to hit to death soon, a re-design on bitclout.com should be forthcoming shortly, as well as referral bonuses for when clouters bring their friends, moms, dogs, and even ex-lovers (?!) to BitClout. Will we get these this week? If the gang is all coming back from OOO right about now, then we reckon it’s possible! If they still have a few more days off? Then next week should be a big one 💥.
Still, community feedback and even criticism that this past two-week period has been too quiet is also warranted. We’ve gotten used to near-constant updates from @diamondhands and co (at least every few days), so being weened off that in parallel to the $clout price continuing to sink has been challenging for the community. It’s easy to say we should all focus on the long-term, but that’s not always enough to keep folks who may already have been on the cusp of leaving around 😢. Let’s see if we can all turn the corner and get this place jumpin’ again in the coming days — we all have a part to play in making that happen. Pump it up, crew!
#4 Moon markets: @BitCreatorCapital call it quits on creator coins 📉
There’s no skirting around the fact that $clout has taken a little detour on the road to the moon 🌙. So have many clouters’ creator coins :(. As $clout prices printed fresh lows in the $50s yesterday, @BitCreatorCapital joined the bloodbath to announce that they will be selling down their holdings both in projects building on BitClout as well as in their own creator coin.
We appreciate the transparency and execution of the sale of their own creator coin holdings here. There’s also an important message for folks building for the long-haul on BitClout to reckon with … raising $clout via your creator coin isn’t necessarily the most ‘flexible’ way to bring capital in for your business. Since creator coins are still largely illiquid investments, with owners discouraged culturally from selling their stakes in themselves, teams using creator coins to represent their accounts can’t really access funds that are locked in their coin to pay their team or expand their efforts with new hires or marketing. Someday we have more robust capabilities that facilitate things like lending coins for fiat or other crypto, but we’re not there yet 🔜💡.
In the interim? We covered it a bit on Monday, but this latest episode is more proof that BitClout would benefit from a dedicated developer fund. Investments from the community and even from community funds like @CreatorFund aren’t enough to sustain serious development on BitClout at current. The $30M development fund that community members have been discussing however would be a good start 📈. As to what exactly a fund or a grant program could look like? Well, for that we’ll turn to our good ol’ friend @charlie for a slick visualization (and ideally inspo for the core team):
Here’s to hoping this is all part of @diamondhands' short-term roadmap 🤞.
#5 Project in focus 🔎: @CloutMegazord paves a secure path for teams to collab on BitClout 🤝👮
If you’re anything like this editor, you’ve seen @CloutMegazord on BitClout but haven’t taken the time to fully appreciate what they have built. Perhaps it’s because the name sounds like a ferocious sort of clout dinosaur 🦕, which, don’t get us wrong, is pretty rad. Perhaps it’s because our attention span on social is frequently goldfish-esque. Either way, it’s time we right this wrong. What is @CloutMegazord? 👇👇👇
Simply put, @CloutMegazord allows multiple users to securely access a single BitClout account. For teams that may be building a product or community project on BitClout together, this is a critical way for multiple clouters to be able to push an account’s public-facing presence forward without compromising security or creating more potential points of failure with multiple people having access to a seed phrase.
More technically, CMZ, (“@CloutMegazord” for short) brings multi-sig functionality, which is available with other commonly used crypto wallets and accounts like MetaMask Ethereum wallets, to BitClout. In plain English, multi-sig, short for multi-signature, just means that a transaction requires two or more signatures before it can be executed; in the case of logging into a BitClout account via @CloutMegazord, as per the team’s FAQ:
Each Zord (co-owner of a BitClout creator coin and account) has its own part of the megazord account seed phrase. This guarantees consensus between co-owners during decision-making around account activities. 💡
In sum? CMZ provides a means to split a seed phrase so multiple owners need each other to access an account. Further, if any one user were to compromise their key, the entire account isn’t compromised either. 🤯
As far as vouching for the security of CMZ is concerned? @paulburke is one of the foremost dev leaders of security on BitClout, and is a firm proponent of third-party audits for all apps that clouters might choose to use 🔒. Here’s what he had to say in a promoted post (via @CloutCast):
For more input from the community and to read a deeper product review, you can peep what @HPaulson + @DevAudit had to say about CMZ here & here.
Ready to give @CloutMegazord a shot with your co-founders or friends? You’re in luck — the team is running a promotion right now where you can earn ~0.6 $clout just for testing out their service and following a few other steps. Here are the deets… now what are you waiting for? 🏃💨💰
Lastly… what’s up with the name? For that we turn back to the CMZ FAQ:
To sign transactions on behalf of a joint account, the zords need to be in touch at the same time to connect their seed phrase parts. It reminded me of how power rangers combine together to create a Megazord. 🤖💪
Whew! That was jam-packed issue. Hope y’all enjoyed. Catch you sometime soon — @BitsTODAY team members also have some OOO time rn, so if you don’t hear from us for a few days… we’re not dead :).
❤
The @BitsTODAY boys
