⚓️ franklin's big mistake
gm.
after much consideration, I have decided to keep the Delta subheading of my newsletter.
sure, it isn’t accurate to the Greek alphabet to go Alpha, Beta, Delta, but who cares about that….all the people who used it are dead now anyway! except for frat boys, I suppose.
it’s an embarrassing mistake, sure, but considering it’s not a 100 ETH mistake, I think I’m doing all right here.
ALPHA ⚓️
I wrote about the PREMINT compromise already on Tuesday, but I’ve continued to think about it and how much worse it *could* have been.
PREMINT got massively popular recently due to the allowlisting craze that has swept NFTs. they charge a pretty penny for their services to allowlist because it’s user-friendly and (apparently) safe.
…all until it wasn’t.
we’re putting a lot of faith in these platforms to protect us and that trust isn’t always earned.
that’s why I was excited to see that they acquired Vulcan Authentication yesterday.
who knows if this deal was already in the works (you’d imagine it was) before they were compromised over the weekend. either way, it shows that PREMINT knows how hesitant we have all become to signing and connecting our wallets to services.
we’ve already seen numerous compromises on Discords that have led to lifted NFTs and scams. most recently, we’re now not even sure our Twitters are safe (Zenaca believes that his Twitter compromise may have been an inside job).
but Vulcan changes things. I just used this method to verify myself for the UltraDAO creators’ Discord. it was seamless and really a breath of fresh air considering I didn’t have to sign *anything* with my wallet.
instead, I dropped some text into the bio of my OpenSea and within a minute, I had access to the channels I wanted.
obviously, it’s not a *real* workaround (it’s more of a “soft” token-gating if you will), but it is one that I imagine will become the standard for Discord. (that’s because it’s not the end of the world if you allow someone into a channel despite them having sold the token or something like that.)
even better, this can be a workaround for signing things with your hard wallet (so long as you made it an OpenSea account), thus protecting your most valuable tokens. the acquisition will hopefully open up resources so Vulcan can verify through other marketplaces too!
BETA ⚓️
good news! yesterday, there was a top 5 ENS sale! bad news…it was a joke offer gone wrong.
Franklin (known best for flipping Bored Apes for *any* kind of profit) slipped up big time. he minted stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth as a joke. he then placed a 100 ETH bid on it to get the ENS sales bot to tweet about it (he does something similar with joebiden.eth FWIW).
for Franklin, this must have seemed too good to be true. that’s because it was.
that’s where the trouble began. someone bought stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth for 1.891 ETH. for Franklin, this must have seemed too good to be true. that’s because it was.
the savvy buyer then accepted Franklin’s offer for 100 ETH (which still was active)…effectively selling him back the domain at 52x the price. that’s a *checks calculator* 98.109 ETH loss for our guy Franklin.
is that bad?
he tried negotiating his money back from the buyer/seller with no luck (he sent him an NFT explaining the situation here). the buyer/seller was already hard at work buying Miladys and historical NFTs by the time the 100 ETH hit his wallet.
it’s a hard lesson for Franklin and us all (that lesson is that jokes on the blockchain aren’t funny…especially when they end up costing you 100 ETH).
DELTA ⚓️
still trying to figure out what all of this means, but it certainly *sounds* like this is good for Polygon and its NFTs…which right now exclusively populate our hidden folder on OpenSea.
