A little about me:
Some of you may be familiar with my writing on the Ethereum blockchain. I made this account to share things that I don't necessarily have an opportunity to cover in ETHNews. No one pays me to write about these things, it's just stuff I find interesting that I wanted to share, so please don't misconstrue any opinions or thoughts I express with those of ETHNews.
I am a writer living in Los Angeles, and I've been covering the blockchain ecosystem for about 4 months now, maybe more. In that time I've written quite a few articles! But I don't always get to write about things that I take a personal interest in, and furthermore, when I write news I have to follow very specific rules. Here I am not confined, however, and am free to peruse some things which you might have heard of, or perhaps, might have passed you by.
Meme Factory's first impression is visually stimulating. The first time I came across Meme Factory's colorful website, I was totally sold on it, I didn't even know what I was looking at and I was sold. Maybe it's because I was born in the 80's in Tarzana, California, and I distinctly remember those years full of light neon colors brightly mishmashing against one another in an awful and awe inspiring cornucopia of color? Maybe it's because I like conveyer belts? Whatever the reason is, I was interested in this project when I noticed it first coming across Medium during my morning readings.
Part of what makes projects like Meme Factory so interesting to me is the tokenization of memetic trends. The idea individual creators of content from various places in the world who interface with an app to make a collectible rare item which is stored and traded via blockchain channels intrigues me. The concept is not unheard of either, as many are aware of the CryptoPunks project initially traded for insignificant amounts of Wei, as little as the cost per transaction, and are now all owned and for sale for varying prices in ETH. Some CryptoPunks have even sold for as much as 2k worth of Ether, which begs the question what would the market be like for the type of assets Meme Factory could churn out?
Lately Meme Factory upped their game by partnering with gifs.com which has a huge user base. I dug around a little on gifs.com website, and I couldn't find anything regarding the collaboration between these two companies there yet, but to be fair the blog entry which told me about this partnership said it was planned for the future. I'm really interested in this project and I want to see what people will make and how value will be assessed to their memes. Some people might think it's childish or inane that a meme would garner value, but to them I say, stranger things have happened.
Another interesting project that caught my eye in the same vein as CryptoPunks is Moon Cat Rescue. These are procedurally generated cats stored on the blockchain. The images can be sent to a wallet address and the record of them is immutable, inarguable and decentralized. All the magic buzz words, right guys? I think it costs 50 cents, and again here we have a fairly inventive website, a nice visual layout, and cute cats. Who doesn't love cats? Who doesn't love moon cats?
In an interesting twist, people can mine cats off the chain by generating seed hashes to find available unique catId's, then submitting that seed to the contract to rescue the MoonCat to which it corresponds. Super fun stuff! There are quite a few Moon Cats remaining, as opposed to the CryptoPunks which were nabbed pretty quickly. I gotta hand it to the developers on this project because they did a hell of a job responding to the reddit community when this was posted up there. (I wanted to cover it at work but sometimes I can't always cover everything that catches my attention.)
There are going to be other stories that find their way onto this blog. I want this to be a space, as I said before, where I can point to some of the interesting things out there and share my personal thoughts about it. I'm not sure how often I can stop by and post, or if my posts will be related to crypto all the time, but I can promise that I'll always be real, and that I'll do my best to keep up with this. As always, I appreciate any support the community can offer me.
My friends.
Best Regards,
Jeremy Nation
On Twitter: @ETH_Nation
Sources for further reading:
https://blog.district0x.io/meme-factory-partnering-with-gifs-com-6a7b25ff80ae
https://memefactory.io (just look at this website!)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6slliw/mooncatrescue_a_minable_blockchain_collectible/
https://www.ethnews.com/the-coming-age-of-digital-collectibles-cryptopunks