Solana, NFTs, Gamer Economics, and a Glorious Rant

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

TL;DR: I guess, in short, all y’all should probably quit your day jobs and start selling $5 NFTs, too.

EDIT #2:

The v0 game concluded, 1st prize won ~9 SOL and four runner-up prizes won about 1 SOL each.

Long time no see!

It’s been a while since I’ve submitted anything of substance here, and with Noonies 2021 around the corner with some coolasf#ck awards up for grabs, as well as 50 titles that will have been crowdsourced - thought I’d pop in and say hello.

We’re here to talk about gaming on the blockchain! Specifically, how we can gamify just about anything that involves prizes or other cool sh#t using NFTs - so long as the fees aren’t prohibitive to interact with the chain.

Take https://stacc.art, @STACCart for example.

We originally launched as a free mint but that means y’all pay the tax in fees (a whopping $0.20). As you saw in the above Twitter thread this is actually groundbreaking for a bunch of different reasons, as they say ‘necessity breeds innovation.’

2400 or so mints later we went to a nearly-free-mint model, and started pegging the mints to ‘less than a booster pack of cards in Eastern Europe.’

Regardless, we’re now about 6000 more mints @ about $5.

What’s cool is metadata - and what won me over to Solana is that they treat NFTs very, very differently (at least by default) by having all of your traits, metadata, even the image or other media on-chain.

What this really means is that your competitors will just link you to an off-chain image, while Solana actually knows that your art is valuable enough to store immutably.

With some magic (ie. you update your pointers to a new on-chain object) we can update all our metadata so long as our thing is mutable, and both updateAuthority and the owner signs.

That brings us to the big ol’ exploit that happened a couple of weeks ago, and a ‘fun bug’ that was introduced in fixing the exploit. For a laugh, I’ll go see if anyone looked at my Pull Request to fix the ‘fun bug.’

Check it out - it remains uncommented and unmerged :( this ‘fun bug’ keeps STACC from updating the metadata(s) as it was before the exploit was fixed.

Unbeknownst to us we’d been exploiting Solana NFTs the entire time we were live with pre-Play-to-Earn features - burning STACCs by fusing, increasing the stats on your remaining character - and training STACCs, by setting a metadata countdown (read: not staking) and getting a wee little random boost when you check-in again.

So, bored, I decided to learn the Rust programming language.

What a trip that’s been.

I’m presently up for the third day in a row trying my best to understand how the f#ck I’m supposed to derive Candy Configs when they were created seedlessly.

I have a hunch that the answer is far easier than I’d thought,

By the way- @redacted_j wrote most or all of Solana as far as I can tell. He is the account responsible for most FOSS updates to Metaplex, and he is the account that owns all of their Rust crates.

Y’all should join his office hours with me to learn all the cool sh#t we can get up to on Solana! Seriously they’re the single biggest alpha drops you could wish for, three times a week! Join Metaplex discord and scope their dev → general.

A n y w h o

As soon as I can get the derived address to sign for the program account, we’re laughing because Metaplex can then refund $$ millions in unused generative ‘candy machine’ configurations. :)

Check this out, my very first interaction ever with Jordan was on this very subject:

My New Project

I did something else in prod the other day, check out https://fair3d.me.

• 1 piece of news you should be aware of is that it doesn’t really show you much unless you log in with a Solana wallet.
• Another piece of news is that y’all have 5 minutes left to bid - but, we all know Hackernoon is curated, and you’ll read this in a few days probably.

Have no fear!

The game will…

…

.. probably?

Run again!

Alas, here’s what it looks like in this v0 version as we speak:

What is all this nonsense? What is a SOL worth?

To be absolutely frank,. I’ve butchered a Solana protocol that Jordan wrote to be the single most fair mechanism for doing sales - for all parties involved.

It includes crowdsourced price discovery (so creators will never again price too high or too low - in either case leaving $ on the table). Furthermore, it includes a whole slew of mandatory and optional features to protect the masses from nefarious actors.

To elaborate, my roommate’s sale concluded recently on https://dyor.market. He’d only had a total of 6 bids, as y’all can see.

The median was half a sol - for a day after the bidding was done, those under half a sol were able to opt into paying that median for a nice shiny CHANCE of winning the lottery and getting a nicer, shinier NFT.

Then, a lottery took place.

Winners could then punch their tickets, pay their 0.5 sol, and walk away smiling knowing they’ve helped introduce someone to the deepest darkest memeist alleyways of the (web3) internet.

Those that bid over 0.5 got refunded the difference, anyone who didn’t win the lottery got refunded in full :) - someone actually bid like 2.5. By the way, he has a trending tweet right now:

I’m doing it a wee bit differently with a custom Fair Launch program…

Remember, if you bid you may get a ticket. If you get a ticket it may win the lottery and if you punch a winning ticket you’ll get an NFT.

That said, Welcome to https://fair3d.me. Hint: press the button that says ‘How does this game work.’

And there you have it, we make an NFT collection fun / deflationary / give them real $ value (aka. utility).

Disclaimer 1

Nothing I do or say should ever be considered financial advice. These are alpha products on a Mainnet-Beta chain, because I can’t be bothered to test stuff on DevNet.

Seriously, risk only what you can afford to lose. Cryptocurrencies of any kind carry an extremely high risk, and should never constitute a majority of your portfolio.

If they do, you’re irresponsibly long. ;)

Disclaimer 2

I am by no means affiliated with Metaplex, however, I think their tech is pretty darned cool. It’s the free and open-source side of Solana, I recommend y’all get acquainted.

Disclaimer 3

I do, however, make a living from the other side hustles I’ve linked here. Please, do your own research and don’t invest in anything you may regret.

The links for my current forks & other reports mostly live here: <https://github.com/dunncreativess ](https://github.com/dunncreativess)https://github.com/dyor-market

This basically sums it up.

I even scraped images of thousands of my tweets and ran a sale y’all missed out on, which puts the per-transaction costs of Ethereum and whatever cent/valuables thing to absolute shame.

Anywho, I won’t get into the politics (war?) for which chain wins the smart chain war, and why. Time will tell.

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