Project Ann regarding FTX and what’s next
Hey all!
To help address some speculation regarding the loomlock balance sheet, and the wonderful undergoings of Mr SBF, thought I’d make some announcements.
We normally generally have a policy of not disclosing our treasury because we want to avoid hyper financialising the project. NFT communities are about love and passion, socialising with friends and being part of growing an awesome brand together. Not about money. But, on this occasion we view it would be unfair to our holders to not be transparent.
We held a sizable portion of our funds on FTX (60% of our immediately liquid cash), and due to the recent meltdown, we are now assuming those funds are gone. We don’t think these funds will be recovered, and we don’t want to plan for a future where we do have a recovery of some FTX funds.
The blame lies with me, but I won’t lambast everyone with “I’m sorry’s”, we have enough of them (Thanks for apologising sam! maybe dont run a giga ponzi, and then you won’t have to keep saying sorry) Instead I just want everyone to know that I know I fucked up, We should not have had as much money on FTX as we did have. I had very good ties to multiple people at FTX who would immediately help with any support queries we would have, and we used FTX for everything operational. Ofcourse none of this is an excuse, and I am very aware of that. However, now is not the time to be sad or mad, that can come later, now is the time to make up for my mistake, and build something truly awesome.
- What does this mean for loomlock/bywassies?
- New Team members
- Wassie Emporium Singapore Update
- Merch
- Hotel Takeover
- Wassie Benefits
- 3d Wassie
- Webaverse
- Community Pool
- Closing Remarks
What does this mean for loomlock/bywassies?
Honestly, not much. Our average sell price on $ETH is far above the current price. We still have ample funding (I am not fond of founders taking big personal payments from a project before the project is complete. You are the ships captain, and if the captain does not go down with the ship, then you are sacrificing people who trusted in your navigation skills.) ((obviously this is in my specific situation, a lot of NFT sales are sales of artwork that requires 0 further contributions/expectations))
We are still going to do everything we set out to. The remaining portion of funds are held on a few exchanges (currently in the process of offramping), on-chain and in our bank accounts. We are still very comfortable for the next few years (when this SBF stim fuelled dumpster fire eventually recovers, which it will, because crypto is still the future). The loomlocks are in production, and the loomlock ethos matters more now than ever. We will still be here building and creating. Everything carries on as usual.
Now that I do have you here, I don’t want this to be seen as a moment of sadness. We have been planning a plethora of announcements and updates towards the end of the year, and im not gonna let some stimmed up fraudster stop this. Seems now is as good a time as ever to give some updates on what the team has been doing.
Team updates
YK (The Notorious Wassielawyer) shall be joining the project full time, to help with our expansion plans and creating decentralised structures that ensures we can’t… sam you with IP.
Jerry(the wonderful nyanquant) will also be joining the team, to help out with our Singaporean community events/emporium management.
Wassie Emporium:
https://twitter.com/wassieEmporium
The Wassie Emporium in Singapore has been quite a success (and it hasn’t even opened yet!) It has helped us gather all our wonderful Singapore wassies who have been incredibly interested in building the Wassie brand with us in Singapore and our long-term goal is to replicate this abroad.
The Wassie Emporium will be officially opening its doors on Tuesday (we finally got all our licenses, thanks to the wonderful locomotiff!) and we will begin to Wassify the hordes of tourists that frequent the area with community-sourced Wassie merch, amazing coffee and occasional events.
The Emporium has also launched its own B2B business while waiting for our retail licenses and we have already catered 500+ bottles of Wassie-branded drinks (coffee, hot chocolate, lemonade etc) to events. We expect to continue delivering more drinks to offices, events etc when our B2B site is up. We will also begin catering food and ice cream around December. Our goal is to make it so that every web3 event will have Wassies as their caterer, not just because we are an NFT brand but because our products are amazing. When we said Wassify the world we meant it, for everything.
We expect the emporium to be fully self-sustaining from a cash flow perspective and to turn a net profit this year.
Emporiums worldwide:
We never wanted to just stop with the emporium in Singapore. We want one in every global hub, so that we can get Wassies into the eyeballs of as many people as possible. We are currently talking to interested parties and partners in these endeavours, and updates shall be posted as we get them.
Merch:
Honestly, merch is one of the hardest pieces to master of any brand. There is so much more that goes into it than meets the eye. Merchandise of a quality brand should be something you would WANT to wear outside, with friends, with family. It should be of a very high quality (I hope our hoodies are testament to this!) Something you’re willing to wear around and about. We are finally getting there. Our merch site is…finally coming! And for Unique Horn DAO members, well, your hoodies are coming too!
Hotel:
Ok this is going to sound pretty crazy but we are taking over a 6-floor 55 room hotel in the heart of Singapore for about 6 months starting from March 2023. We will be Wassifying it with artwork sourced from the community (Pizza and any community volunteers will help curate) and we will require about 80 pieces to ensure that the rooms, corridors and shared spaces are appropriately wassie-fied! We are also looking to install a giant ‘Hotel By Wassies’ sign on top of the building where it currently says [Redacted Hotel]. If the UnicornDAO agrees — we will also maybe have the top floor be Unicorn Wassie themed!
Singapore Wassie benefits:
We will be onboarding onto an app (developed by a fellow Wassie!) which will allow us to provide Wassies with exclusive perks and discounts. For example, show Proof of Wassie on the app (we are starting on tokenproof before migrating over to the other app) and claim a free coffee, discounts on food & beverages etc. We are starting from Singapore for now but we hope to eventually bring this worldwide!
3D .vrm Files: We are almost done with the 3D Wassie/Couch .vrm’s for all of our collection! It’s been a joy piecing these together with the team (going from 2d to 3d is… a journey, as you realise things that don’t clip in the 2d realm seem to love to phase through each other in the 3d). Wassies are finally ready to not just dominate the metaverse, but Wassie holders are ready and able to import their .vrm’s into any game that supports the format. And this piece is something I think collections are forgetting about. Empowering holders means giving them the tools to go about the digital AND physical world being able to wear their web3 personas. Lots of projects have gated in 3d models, that aren’t open/accesible, and lots of projects have .vrms with no guidance or support on how to utilise these file formats. We want to make sure we don’t fall into this trap and will be putting out guides and tutorials on how to fully bring your .vrm into it’s best potential, be it vtubing, streaming vr through .vrm friendly streaming platforms (shoutout to the guys at Liv, who are doing gods work in enabling true VR streaming for all)
For further reading recommend y’all check out: https://vrm-consortium.org/en/, it helps explain the ethos behind .vrm’s and why it’s such a cool standard.
And here’s a cool video showcasing what you can do with custom .vrms (in a game called craftopia)
Webaverse: This drive to enable our holders to fully utilise their .vrms into the digital is why we have a very deep relationship with the team at Webaverse. Webaverse is a game engine that natively supports .vrms and blockchain assets. Us, Holders, Future teams, anyone can build on webaverse using these open standards. (It’s actually how we found the awesome Platote!) This enabling of borderless creativity is something we stand very heavily for, and Weba is an amazing playground for it.
WebaLandDAO Airdrop:
As part of our relationship with Webaverse we acquired a very sizable chunk of land (the majority otc pre-drop) in The Upstreet (Webaverse’s flagship MMO, same place that the Webaverse Genesis Pass holders will have their land) To create a utopia for Wassies! The details of the DAO are not fully fleshed out yet, but we didn’t want to just give holders their own plots of land and just be like “ok, it’s done!” instead we want to build something truly awesome (in an open ecosystem) that all Wassies can call their home in the metaverse. We will be taking a snapshot for this airdrop sometime near the end of November, and will release more updates once the snapshot is done.
Poker: We all need something chill to do. The last few months have been… pretty chaotic. We’ve decided to expand the size and scope of our poker games, introduced a grand prize (a really really cool one) and will be live commentating the matches (with ur guest host loomdart, and hopefully some friends). We want to make this a CT spectacle everyone can rally around, but keep it fun and family friendly (there will not be any cash buyins unfortunately, due to some legal reasons and also wanting to make this inclusive to all Wassies and understanding that this makes calculating overall hand sizes.. complicated) but there will be prizes!
The community pool: We had a strong plan for how to decentralise the community pool Wassies, but pursuant to recent events we want to ensure that it is as decentralised as possible. We are revamping our plans for this matter. Expect an update in the next few weeks, and for some of you, the team to re-slide into your DMs.
bit miscellaneous but still awesome:
We’ve set up base in Dubai! Some of our wonderful bywassies team members have joined me (very closely, we are roomates now) in Dubai so that we can work more closely on our more tech heavy strategies. There isn’t much to update here from a project end, but it’s exciting for me!
Loom, is crypto over:
Ok so again this is less project related but it’s more related to why I love working on loomlock/bywassies and being in crypto in general. People see the stuff that happened with FTX, with 3ac, with Luna, and think wow, crypto is a scam. This is the complete wrong mindset. Crypto is a biasless permissionless peer to peer network. It’s an open playground to build anything on. It’s an unfortunate truth that such an open playground will have people build ponzis on it. And it’s another even more unfortunate truth that we will all have to have lessons beat into us over and over again before they become canon lore in this new digital world. Don’t trust, verify. Self custody what you can. Ensure you have private seed backups. We learn with education and lessons. But don’t let the bad detract you from all of the good crypto has to offer. Open Playgrounds are where beautiful adventures and stories are made, it’s just we all need to get better at calling out the bad actors. I’m still here, the team is still here, we aren’t going anywhere, since there is just no where that is as fun, adventurous, exciting, and honestly, social, as crypto!
My heart goes out to all in the crypto industry, it’s truly a very sad few days, and alot of people got very badly fucked. However, we must remember, crypto goes on. There’s always another block. What we are all building here together is beautiful, and we can’t let the thing we are trying to prevent be the reason we stop working.
