086. All (5M+) eyes on BitClout.
Howdy partners!
How are you? Been a minute, hasn’t it. We’re back in the saddle over here at @BitsTODAY 🤠 — we know you missed us. After some good time off, @nvo and squad are ready to hit it hard and to keep you all as up-to-date as possible w/r/t to the goings-on on BitClout 🌐. Here’s to hoping the rest of y’all are ready to match our energy! Shall we do a recap of the past few days, including some updates we skipped so far this week? Cool, let’s do eet 👇👇👇
Bits on the menu tonight:
BuzzClout: Exclusive updates from @bitcloutsignal & @bithunt ⚡️
Ubiquitous UX drops: ETH to $clout swapping is here (and no, it’s not @BitSwap this time) 🔀
Moon markets 🌙: NFTs on BitClout going postal? 💀 🚀
Roadmap update 🛣️: The community’s patience gets tested … ⌛
Boomer media 📰: From Billboard to Barstool? 🍻🔜
Diamondhands’ drops 💎
#1 BuzzClout
Seems there was plenty of coin price pumps while we were out! Let’s get back in the groove; @bitcloutsignal, who’s up and down today 📈📉?
Same goes on the community project front. @bithunt, whose been making the biggest moves out there? @BitsTODAY still lookin’ good in that top 10 👀:
#2 Ubiquitous UX drops: ETH to $clout swapping is here (and no, it’s not @BitSwap this time) 🔀
Alrighttty let’s get back in our groove with some UX drops coverage. Before we back-track, let’s start with breaking news. The latest on BitClout? Buying $clout with ETH is now live 💱!
When this functionality went live earlier today for the first time, it sputtered a bit and got taken down for a few minutes. Must have been some residual bugs that needed working through 🐛. All systems appear to be a go now, however! And make no mistake, this is a big step for BitClout as it broadens accessibility to the full ecosystem of crypto users and adds interoperability for $clout with the ETH blockchain. Between being able to buy with bitcoin and Ethereum, there are few crypto users who don’t have a solid way to buy $clout too. Connecting $clout to MetaMask also offers ETH users an easy way to transfer value off BitClout to their ETH wallets. From there, swaps to other cryptocurrencies should be pretty simple, too!
While more options to buy $clout are great for the platform and will help users who come from other chains onboard onto BitClout more easily, one factor worth noting is how regularly the Ethereum blockchain is clogged by NFT minting activity on it. This makes the infamous ‘gas’ fees on Ethereum prohibitively expensive at times; especially for smaller swaps, gas fees can cut into the final value substantially 😔:
All the more reason to love the txn fees on BitClout tho, amiright? Big shout out to @Maebeam, who pushed this update live earlier today! And thx to @Aikon for always being on top of the latest dev updates for us ;)
What else did we miss over the past few days? For one, the functionality to burn and transfer NFTs went live as scheduled on Wednesday … it just hasn’t hit the bitclout.com front end yet. That hasn’t stopped enterprising devs from exploring what this functionality looks like on their own nodes and frontends. Here’s @paulburke w/ more on the specs of burning in particular:
There were also some notable outages across nodes while we were still returning from our travels. @diamondhands chimed in and identified the culprit as the NFT transfer functionality update — turns out that threw a temporary wrench in a bunch of things, including features on the bitclout.com frontend:
4 hours is a pretty long time to re-synch, after nodes already experienced a lot of downtime. It’s not the 17-hour blockchain-wide outage that Solana experienced last week … but still suboptimal. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t happen with future protocol level updates 🤞.
#3 Moon markets 🌙: NFTs on BitClout going postal? 💀 🚀
Don’t look now! But the last few weeks have seen a nice uptick in the volume of high profile, splashy NFTs on BitClout. Sure, it’s not much compared to the absolute mania gripping NFT speculation on Ethereum and platforms like opensea.io. Still, considering how few DAUs there are on the BitClout blockchain relatively, things are looking interesting over here 👀. Missed some of the action? Let’s catch up together.
First and foremost, we want to give a massive shoutout to @MonicaRizzolli for her achievements off-BitClout. Her curated collection for Art Blocks (NFTs on Ethereum) was met with massive acclaim from NFT collectors, and sports a floor price of 20+ ETH. You read that right — the cheapest NFT in the collection costs more than $60,000. And rightfully so — they’re spectacular 🌸🖼️ and fully generative (i.e. randomly generated at the time of minting):
Considering her success off BitClout, we’re all the more excited that @MonicaRizzolli has decided to grace us with her presence on BitClout. And guess what, she’s releasing NFTs here too! @apeszn wasted no time in ape’ing into the last NFT @MonicaRizzoli still had for sale on BitClout this week after seeing how her NFTs were selling on Ethereum — a highly prudent move if you ask us 🦍. This NFT is another stunning work, and the final price of 305 $clout isn’t too shabby either 😏⬆️.
Elsewhere, @cloutpunk and @FUCKEDUPCATS are among the avatar-based projects that have been heating up on BitClout too 🥵. First, we saw a 200 $clout secondary sale in @cloutpunk that got folks AMPED. Shoutout to @Murkury for putting a portion of the $clout back into the community.
From there, we also got a bigtime 20 $clout sale for a @FUCKEDUPCATS + @ghozt collab piece, as well as some solid secondary sales for the cats! Secondary sales are solid signs of an increasingly vibrant marketplace — you love to see some action coming back to BitClout NFTs! 😻
Finally, we were also blown away by what @coolman_coffeedan is doing by combining BitClout NFTs with physical paintings. Check out the painting @100 got in the mail recently. Time to squirrel some $clout away in our wallets and save up for @coolman_coffeedan NFTs… we NEED one of these for the BitsTODAY newsroom 😋🥺❤️:
Looking to keep up with all the NFT activity on BitClout as it keeps bubblin’ up to a boil’ 🔥? Luckily for all of us, it looks like @jckly , @mattetre and @mubashariqbal have been working on an activity feed hosted in the @Polygram NFT marketplace. You can check it out here.
#4 Roadmap update 🛣️: The community’s patience gets tested … ⌛
When we left for a ~2 week vacation close to the beginning of the month, we expected things to start to ramp-up while BIG Time while we were out. As it turns out, we’re back now… and they’re still quite slow. As far as covering the news is concerned… that’s a good thing! As far as the community’s engagement is concerned … not so much 😂.
The community itself has done a lot to keep the energy alive, especially with NFT action starting to take off again, as we explored in section #3. Still, patience is growing thinner. There’s no pitchforks quite yet, but we can’t blame folks for beating their drums of frustration louder 🥁:
Of course, the core team has earned a lot of trust from the BitClout community based on their accomplishments and transparency thus far. Still, for BitClout to challenge traditional social media and to fully decentralize, it’s paramount that the community continue to challenge the ‘central’ team to improve and push the envelope. That’s how we can all win eventually 💪.
First and foremost, as noted by @lukasjakson, there’s a whole slew of questions the community posted to @diamondhands and co. from weeks ago that @diamondhands noted he would answer but hasn’t gotten around to yet. Perhaps a 2nd FAQ / community town-hall is warranted? We’d love to help:
What else are we waiting for? Well, the big re-design of bitclout.com certainly comes to mind. Perhaps we’ll get that this coming week? Or next? Or the week after that ;). Tbd. The Coinbase listing is also something a lot of folks are eagerly awaiting. We’d mark it as less critical than improvements to BitClout itself, though it will help w/ broader-scale recognition of BitClout among the crypto community. Here’s what 💎🙌 had to say about Coinbase recently:
Tbh it feels like we’re moving in circles here. Referrals, Coinbase, etc. were probably all announced a bit early. Granted, we’ve grown used to ‘soon’ meaning weeks, if not days on BitClout. Now that we’ve been waiting for a lot of these big 💦 for longer than that, it’s probably time to manage our own expectations. And what’s a few more weeks of waiting? We’re sure going to stick around for it. But the same can’t be said of (or expected of) everyone 🤷.
We for one think some tentative dates would actually be helpful, as opposed to the more nebulous ‘hopefully this week’. Even if the dates are further out and include buffer, it would help the community plan and build 🧱🏗️.
And all that said? It looks like we’ll be able to hang our hats on at least ONE major update this week. I think EVERYONE is ready for something lol:
#5 Boomer media 📰: From Billboard to Barstool? 🍻🔜
To round out our recap of all things BitClout since we last checked in, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention all the media attention BitClout has been receiving over the past week! It started with the Barstool Sports tweeting out an article about BitClout, complete with a super sensational headline 🤣:
So far, this hasn’t led to any follow-up actions, e.g. Dave Portnoy officially claiming his BitClout account. We reckon he’d like it here based on his penchant for speculation, whether in sports betting or stocks. But maybe he just wants to tease us first a bit 😜. Let’s see if Dave-y day trader joins us to become Dave-y creator coin ape soon 🦍🔜.
As for the article itself, it had its typical Barstool flair, but also interestingly took a dim view of BitClout for the simple and fair reason that creating an entire economy for the buying and selling of coins that foot to actual humans seems overly transactional if not problematic. We prob still don’t talk about the ethical and mental health challenges creator coins pose enough yet 💡 Here’s one of the article’s closing takes:
p.s. - What a wild world we're living in. Shit like this always make me think about what my grandpa would think if he was still alive. I don't think I could explain something like this to him if I had an entire year. The entire concept of blockchain, social media, social credit scores, and a stock exchange tying them all together is so fucked on so many levels I just don't see anybody from that era of normalcy being able to grasp any of it whatsoever. His head would literally explode.
Elsewhere, Billboard ran a piece on BitClout, including quotes from @JakeUdell and some of our other favorite creators, that focused especially on the opportunities for artists that the platform can unlock 🔑.
While the article is behind a paywall, here are a few of the money shots we smuggled out for you 🤫. You can also read the full thing here .
The idea is that creators — among them artists — get to tap into their most dedicated fans for funding, and those fans get to share in their success. Udell quickly applied the concept to the music industry, imagining if he had invested in Billie Eilish’s coin after attending one of her earliest shows. “That is an amazing, synergistic journey to be on with your fans, because they’re incentivized in your success at a whole new level,” he says.
So… wen @billieeilish?
Despite the initial chaos, the idea struck a chord with the fast-growing community of crypto enthusiasts who seek to use blockchain technology to transform the economics of music careers. It’s no mistake that BitClout launched amid the music industry’s NFT frenzy. In a rare interview, Diamondhands (whose coin currently trades at $6,898) tells Billboard that the platform was initially meant to launch four months later in July, but that when blockchain captured the zeitgeist in the spring, he decided not to wait.
Next up? Shoutout @ClayPerryMusic with the feature!!
Perry constantly engages on the platform and even released a rap ode called “BitClout,” which has collected 88,000 Spotify streams. Those streams are probably worth around $400. But perhaps more valuable is the roughly $50,000 investment in his coin he received following the release from an account widely believed to belong to BitClout’s investors. His coin is currently worth $884 and has a total value on the platform of $56,500, helping him move out of his parents’ place into his own apartment with a built-in studio. “BitClout changed my life,” Perry says — and he even got a tattoo of the platform’s logo to prove it.
Pretty cool press all around! Also featured in the article was @echosmith, who have been engaging readily and organically on BitClout. We’d like to close with a quote from them that we found particularly salient. BitClout certainly isn’t all the way there yet … but the promise of the platform is showing, and boomer media publications like Billboard are taking note 🌙:
(Echosmith) offers a virtual meet-and-greet to anyone who “tips” one of their posts with six or more “diamonds” (bundles of coins, the cost of which is ever-changing), which amounts to at least $356 at time of publication. So far, the band has done about 15… “I’m not a million percent convinced yet, and [BitClout] has to scale way bigger than it is now,” David says. “But something about it is really sticky."
Thanks for tuning in gang! Hope y’all didn’t miss us too much this week. We promise not to leave for as long anytime again soon :).
Much love,
@BitsTODAY