The Midnight Moment: Take Your Vitamins
Turning failure into an actionable experiment.
During an auction last week with @itstheAGAH, I tried a spontaneous idea to create a crowdfund to acquire one of the Twitter NFTs from @AbiWolcoff.
Well, it didn’t work.
And it’s honestly okay. What we know for certain is that spontaneity is a risk. A gamble. Sometimes it works, other times…well, you get an undesirable outcome. Ultimately, you learn either way and I’m happy we tried it.
Here’s why:
The AGAH community has seen it in action and can now work to replicate it and do it better. The act of deploying a crowdfund takes a few steps, and if the AGAH community wanted to participate they could use platforms like Mirror or Juicebox.
It taught me that spur of the moment ideas need to have a lot more momentum and energy to execute. Sometimes you get a spontaneous idea to take hold. Sometimes, there's not enough momentum to push it. I did some work on twitter and telegram but could I have shilled this daily? Possibly, but it was one of those, 'in the moment' type of things where if action isn't captured immediately, it won't stick.
And I got to experiment with @viamirror more. Getting used to a platform’s features makes it much easier to move into action, teach others, and find new ways to create.
Three wins in my book.
No problem. I closed the contract and sent the money back to each backer. But something neat happened: we still have the $VITAMIN tokens made from the crowdfund contract. Typically for Mirror crowdfunds, if it doesn’t hit its target raise, backers have the ability to refund themselves which burns the tokens in the process. Now, that incurs a gas cost and would’ve created a different type of transaction (more on this later), but due to an issue with my contract, we weren’t able to refund ourselves in that manner. I had to do it manually.
The transactions in question:
Transaction 1 - Sirsu.eth
Transaction 2 - Cancersucks.eth
Transaction 3 - Sirsu.eth (didn't have adequate funds in the proxy wallet for the would be VITAMIN group, so sent it here to finish out the rest of the transactions)
Transaction 4 - pan_danil
Transaction 5 - redactedpride
Afterward, I sat around thinking, “what could I do with these tokens, and how could I still make a positive action to the backers of the fund experiment?” It didn’t take long for me to think about Proof of Beauty (POB) to create visual artifacts (a generative art process) of the experiment from a curated set of transactions. So I put out a Twitter Thread recapping the events of the crowdfund, what we learned, and tagging them in the hopes they’d entertain my idea.
They did. Pretty quickly I might add.
Naturally, I’m excited and I’ve already wrote the copy for the curated set to be added to POB’s website, the transaction hashes to be included, and an idea for how this can be tied into the $VITAMIN tokens.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
There are roughly 2.66k $VITAMIN tokens in circulation, with myself holding the lion share at 1.9k $VITAMIN. The other backers have 500, 200, and 30 $VITAMIN. To build a substantial pool of tokens that can be used, 5 $VITAMIN should be the minimum amount to join…whatever this group wants to be. To ensure a solid, close knit community, I am allocating the overage I received from the $VITAMIN contract (roughly 930 tokens) for new members.
With that said, for the POB collection, folks interested in owning a memento of this glorious failure, can earn 5 $VITAMIN. With the token allocation of 930, that yields at least 180 new token holders. With the curated collection having 9 pieces, new members can participate in a snapshot to decide what to do with the remaining tokens, how we could onboard new members, and what other experiments we can come up with.
The POB collection drops this weekend. Follow me on Twitter for updates to this project and be on the lookout for my other announcements stemming from my last newsletter.
The beauty of crypto is that even failed experiments can turn into sprawling ideas repurposed into something dope.
So who’s in?