046. $CLOUT makes history.
Well hello there,
What’s there to say? The last 48 hours have been some of the most jam-packed, exciting, and also exhausting in the relatively short history of Bitclout so far. $CLOUT GOT F@%$& LISTED! And started trading! A bunch of new 🐳s (including granddaddy @chamath), legendary CEOs, and other notable trendsetters hopped on this wild wild western wagon. There were incremental UX changes galore. And as always unfortunately, new hacks and pitfalls. @douglass even took an S out of his account handle 🤯!!! Absolutely recklesss.
Yes, it’s been a lot to keep up with. But that’s what gets us fired up here at @bitstoday. Can we cover everything under the clout-iverse sun? No. Will we take you on a little journey tonight through the pertinent, positive, negative, and of course, the absurd? You better believe it. LFG!
Guest cover art by @gjh
Bits on the menu tonight:
BuzzClout: Exclusive look at today’s movers and shakers presented by @bitcloutsignal
Ubiquitous UX Drops: Site changes and NFTs
(*NEW SECTION*) Moon Markets: $Clout bursts into trading like the mf Koolaid man. 🚨📈🚨 🚨📈🚨
Project in Focus: @BitcloutPulse overshoots the moon, now orbiting Mars 🛰️
General Absurdity: Ten Steps Forward, One Step Back
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:
While it already seems like ancient history, there were a number of key UX updates across Bitclout.com yesterday. Should these have been implemented all along? Sure. Better late than never? The core team’s been up to a lot after all.
First and foremost, you can now see a disambiguation of who has engaged with posts on Bitclout. For all of us who have been liking our own posts since time memorial… well, no shame! You gotta love yourself before someone else can ❤️
Similar updates were made to wallets and profiles, including denominating wallet balances in $clout (1 $clout = 1 $clout, after all!), showing how many people creators follow, as well as letting you see who their followers are and who they follow.
More importantly, buried in @diamondhands mega-thread surrounding the $clout listing, was also a tease that NFTs and an NFT marketplace on Bitclout are imminent:
While this will be a great push for artists and will provide more optionality for monetizing on Bitclout, we did immediately wonder whether this ‘special feature,’ namely offering percentages of sales as ‘dividends’ of sorts for investors, will fly too close to the ☀️ of regulatory scrutiny.
Much of the regulatory risk for Bitclout lies in whether creator coins could be classified as a security. If and when these coins reward investors in recurring, structured ways, comparable to the ways in which equity securities often reward investors with a share of profits, then it could be easier to build a legal case equating creator coins to existing securities. If you’re reading this SEC… no, @bitstoday will not testify 🐀🐀🐀
#3 (*NEW SECTION*) Moon Markets: $Clout bursts into trading like the mf Koolaid man. 🚨📈🚨
There’s nothing we can say to introduce this section that’d be better than what @bluepartyhat already said:
‘Nough said indeed. This 🚀 just engaged its first set of thrusters, folks. That’s right, the markets for $clout are now OPEN on blockchain.com!
At around 8 am PT this morning, trading opened, with $clout pricing around $150. A far cry from the $295 it was indicated at last night, it’s still consistent with where prices have hovered in OTC recently, and not far off from the ‘phantom’ prices that were displayed on Bitclout.com over the past few weeks.
Zooming out, what’s more astounding here is that $clout went from concept to exchange-listed cryptocurrency with a multi-billion dollar market cap in around 💯 days. After listing and beginning trading on blockchain.com, other components of the crypto-markets ecosystem quickly picked up $clout, too. For one, coingecko.com has live trading info for $clout up, as do coinmarketcap.com and Coinbase. Coinbase will likely list $clout too soon considering CEO @Brian_Armstrong is now active on Bitclout.
To boot, you can now “buy” (more technically, trade) clout directly on Bitclout.com (or ultimately any node for that matter). Here’s @lazynina with the scoop:
At current, volume is barely a trickle, though we expect this to change as more exchanges come online and Bitclout garners more interest with the general public. And while a few hours of trading data isn’t much to go off, it’s clearly plenty for the technical analysts (and meme artists) to get to work cranking out #hopium for all of us:
Of course, lost in all the excitement around the exchange listing has been the unfortunate downtime and challenges @BitSwap has faced. To catch up on the latest there, we’d direct you to a helpful post-mortem posted by the team today (see here). While we’re not stoked on the outages, we appreciate transparency 👍.
#4 Project in Focus: @BitcloutPulse overshoots the moon, now orbiting Mars 🛰️
We wouldn’t have guessed it’d be possible to make as much of a 💦 as the news of $clout’s official listing and live trading would. Somehow, @BitcloutPulse may have actually exceeded the hype though. The platform, which positions itself as a ‘Bloomberg for Bitclout,’ has been around since the very first days of Bitclout. Today? They launched an entirely revamped platform to trade and track creator coins, wallets and more — and it’s insanely slick.
We’ll admit it. We’ve barely gotten used to having a creator coin in the first place. Let alone analyzing our coin price the way we would have looked at a stock chart 6 months ago 😂. But that’s hardly the only feature that the new @BitcloutPulse platform is launching with. What else can you use their platform for? Here’s the greatest hits:
Trading: Comprehensive trading dashboard with integrated charts that include indicators and drawing tools. Enabling new and innovative ways to study the coin prices of the creators you follow
Wallet Analyzer: Improved Wallet tool with an enhanced interface that allows for easier deep dives on user holdings and history
Watchlists: Track your favorite creators and favorite wallets to find your next trade or better understand trends on Bitclout
Activity Feed: Track creator coin transactions globally or specifically for your watchlist in a single dashboard. For now, this only shows buy/sell transactions, but soon all transactions across the BitClout blockchain will be viewable
What propelled the @BitcloutPulse launch well beyond the moon? The support they got from some of the biggest fish on the platform, including @diamondhands himself, who readily acknowledged this is a better trading interface than Bitclout.com and that Bitclout.com may be rendered irrelevant soon 🤯:
Why take it all from us though? Here’s a quote from @BitCloutPulse cofounder @automatic👇:
“We began building BitClout Pulse the very day BitClout launched and since then we’ve only become more excited to be building tools for this community. The first version of Pulse was a simple data product, but now we are excited to release a new version which takes the first step towards our much larger vision. The new Pulse elevates the creator coin trading experience and makes it easy to discover, track, and trade creators all through a unified interface. This is just the beginning, though. We have so much more in store and we can’t wait to show you what we’re building in the coming weeks!” -@automatic
Can’t wait for you guys to show us what’s in store either. Chop chop legends! 👏🏼
#5 General Absurdity: Ten Steps Forward, One Step Back
With the exchange listing officially ✔️ing a box that skeptics, haters, and interested-but-not-convinced folks alike were all waiting for, $clout has stimulated all kinds of conversation and excitement in the past 24 hours.
Firstly, we saw CNBC discuss Bitclout for the first time, with a partner at VC giants Sequoia going live to discuss the promise of the project. Honestly tho… let one of us community members who has been in the trenches the past 100 days get up there; we think we could make a more … eloquent bull case 😬.
Of course, as you’d well know from reading this issue, some MASSIVE names like @Chamath, Shopify CEO, @tobi, as well as hoops legend John Calipari (@ukcoachcalipari) have all started posting on Bitclout. Will they stick? Will they invest in plebeians like us? Who knows, but it’s pretty absurd to see them migrate over, especially given some of them are very active on Twitter, this early in Bitclout’s history. There’s also innumerable cool ideas that come from successful entrepreneurs like @tobi joining. This one from @artz had our wallets watering 🤤:
While there’s lots to celebrate, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also encourage caution as things change on the platform at lightning pace. Hence our title for this section, it’s rarely 100% smooth sailing in these stormy seas 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️.
A highly concerning number of accounts have reported falling victim to $clout pirates who have wiped their wallets in recent weeks. This has become so pervasive that it’s clear this isn’t a problem with seed phrases leaking manually. Rather, the dev community suspects there’s app(s) for Bitclout out there that have been compromised and thereby gave hackers access to users’ seed phrases (which would have been shared to login to a Bitclout profile).
This is very much still a developing investigation. Still, we’re seeing a wave of rightly cautious creators transfer their holdings to new dedicated wallet accounts, from which they’ve never logged in to other apps, reducing the risk of their being compromised.
It’s been an amazing, frenetic, chaotic good few days on Bitclout. Don’t forget to take care of yourself. We appreciate you ❤,
The @bitstoday boyz