Community Member Spotlight: Digidus Prime (@DigidusPrime)
[Interview by IotaPoet]
IotaPoet: Which coin do you think will be worth more on 21 August 2024 — IOTA or Shimmer?
DigidusPrime: I know you want me to make a call on this but I honestly don’t know. My gut reaction is that Iota will be more valuable in a year and half because it is the primary coin while Shimmer is the staging network. These are the two key things I think will tip the scale in either direction, IOTA or SHIMMER.
Shimmer is REALLY exciting in all that it is bringing to the crypto world. When you think about how it stacks up against Bitcoin, the mess Ethereum is embroiled in, and other great protocols like Cardano, Polygon, and Cosmos…well Shimmer really stands out. It is delivering the best of the best with: speed, security, utility and especially its approach to decentralization. So few crypto enthusiasts know about these massive advantages. Through marketing its uniqueness and utility it will fuel adoption by devs and degens alike. This is how Shimmer wins.
The way Iota tips the scale is decentralization. Especially with all the centralized exchanges and their chains imploding (Luna, FTX, and friends) the next round of big winners in crypto will mix utility driven tech with decentralization. Iota has put a lot of effort and brain power into limiting the ability of any one entity or small group of players to make unilateral decisions for the network. I hope once smart contracts rolls out the delivery of decentralization will be the main focus. While Shimmer delivered as promised its Cambrian Explosion of endless and amazing new tools and services, Coordicide will be the Big Bang that resets the Crypto Universe. It will put Iota at the center of a new cross chain meta-network that will grow things as yet unimagined. Iota wins the price battle with Coordicide.
IP: So tell us- how did your IOTA journey start?
DP: After watching the “Rise and Rise of Bitcoin” with my wife and declining to take her good advice on buying what I felt was (WAY!) overpriced Bitcoin at $1000, I started to follow crypto. My profession is real estate services, coaching, and technology development. In 2017 I was at a small meeting of very successful real estate professionals in California. We met there every year to learn from each other how best to create real estate wealth for our clients and ourselves and this was a time when bitcoin was approaching $20,000. With many of my buddies super excited about their crypto holdings, I expressed some disillusionment regarding the cumbersome nature of the bitcoin network and wildly varying miner fees…and the miners! It seemed to me such a terribly inefficient system both in end user convenience, energy usage, and exorbitant cost. It made no sense to me! One of the group members pulled me aside later and suggested I check out Iota. That night back in my hotel room I began my research and started a journey that changed the course of my life.
IP: What stood out about IOTA for you?
DP: Eureka! Crypto made sense to me for the first time! I can send 100 coins to anyone and they receive 100 coins! This is how, in my mind, crypto should work! I don’t get charged to send an email over my internet connection, why should I pay a portion of my crypto every time I interact with it. Feeless is how people will actually use crypto! It made sense. As someone who helps people with their real estate wealth, we talk about taxes a lot. Bitcoin has an eternal, guaranteed, and ever increasing tax, and one day when that tax goes away there is no further motivation for the network to be supported. I was all in on Iota. From there I began a very challenging adventure to buy Iota in the United States in 2017 and then I needed to figure out how to find the Iota community.
IP: You state in your bio you are a Bitcoin blasphemer. What separates IOTA from Bitcoin?
DP: I think I covered this fairly well above :) I am open about my opinions on Bitcoin and while appreciative of what it brought to the world, I am not shy about questioning its limitations. One lesson I learned early in my Crypto Twitter days with the Iota community and others is to not fall into the tribalism trap and blindly shill any coin. It took me some time to realize Iota can be successful alongside other great projects, we can all learn from each other and appreciate all the different paths that have led us into this brave new world of crypto. If you are going shill, it’s OK, just do so with an open mind and with the source data to illustrate why you are so passionate about a project.
IP: They describe you as the IOTA Shitcoin King. Tells us more about the $DGPR token and its goal?
DP: I minted $DGPR as a practice token in hopes of learning more about the process, utility, and limitations of a new Shimmer ecosystem token. My goal was, and still is, to create a token for my business to use with my Realtor clients as a common medium of exchange to reward their participation in industry best practices, education, and mutual business success. In exchange my clients will be able to “purchase” materials, services, and other benefits I offer in helping them grow their businesses.
As part of the above experiment I started giving $DGPR away on Twitter. Immediately I discovered there was demand and excitement AND engagement from many people who previously were not engaged in the Iota Community. It was Kutkraft’s $HIT coin episode 26 of Spec Weekly on YouTube that spurred me into action. I would not have known how to do it otherwise.
Once the Digidus Prime Token was created and in demand I asked the question I ask of all my business ventures, “How may I bring value?” Most specifically for $DGPR, “How can I bring value to this Iota Community I have come to love over the years?” From there my mission was FUN, Utility, and Adoption. Naming myself King of the $hitcoins…well that’s fun and my website was fun to buidl with as much stupid $hit as I could think of!
As I saw so many cool and interesting people minting new Shimmer tokens and hearing their fun and usefully ambitions for those tokens, I realized quickly that the community needed a better way to deliver tokens. We were all cutting and pasting a hundreds of addresses from Twitter into a wallet to get the tokens out there, so I set out to figure out how to help with this as one way to bring value to the community. What happened was amazing. People on Twitter and Discord starting sharing their fun ideas on how to distribute tokens, people from the Iota Foundation helped, community members wrote code for me. In short the whole community rallied around each other and many stepped up to help me deliver! Literally, I was able to deliver $DGRP to thousands of Shimmer addresses. It all made a huge impact on the network. Tangle Pay had over 4000 new wallet installations the week I was pushing everyone to share their Shimmer Addresses in order to receive the first big $DGP airdrop. @Denzadau on Twitter, who regularly reports Shimmer network data started to report unique and massive increases in activity. We broke our first distribution wallet with over 8000 transactions. But the coolest part for me was most of these thousands of NEW network participants had to BUY SHIMMER $SMR as network storage deposits in order to keep the $DGPR tokens I was sending them all! We had done it!!!! SUCCESS!!! We were having fun with all this, we as a community had built something useful, and the network was experiencing massive new adoption.
The goal moving forward has not changed. The questions are now simply, “How do we have more fun?” “How do we become more useful to the Iota Shimmer Community and Crypto at large?” and “How may we share our story and the Iota Shimmer story with the world and open as many doors as possible for people to enter our generous, passionate, and fun Community?”
IP: Following on from the last question, how do you spot a good shitcoin?
DP: $hitcoins are about having fun with crypto! With Wall Street moving in on Bitcoin in a big way and fraudulent and incompetent people acting terribly with billions of dollars at play, crypto is often so stinking serious….come on, let’s have some FUN! If you see a $hitcoin that makes you giggle, think about something you haven’t thought of in long time, consider something new, or straight up FOMO….that’s a gem. I love so many of the Tokens people have minted and sent me, with many of them in line to be distributed through the #DigiTower. There are so many great tokens! One I smile about whenever I think about it is $RUG. The Minter, (@_emmaz_ on Twitter) created it to send to people who have had the terrible experience of a rug pull. The token is meant to ease their pain. It can also be held in your wallet to ease any anxiety one may have about potential rug pulls….lol…I love that! I need some! If anyone else needs some, I will be sending $RUG out SOON to all the $DGPR hodlers through the DigiTower. FYI the DigiTower is what I named the the automated token distribution tool a community member built for us. Another one I am interested in following is $PARK, minted by @PaulSan94493390 (Twitter). He is envisioning a way for pedestrians to get paid to report open parking spots to drivers looking for them! So cool! This is one of the tokens $DGPR hodlers will receive soon as well. In fact every week or two the goal is to tell the story of a new Shimmer token and deliver it to everyone via the DigiTower.
IP: You are very active on Twitter with over 10k followers, how did you build such a following?
DP: Initially my following was very small and included only Iota folks and a few other crypto people. Once I started the TangleReport.com my intention was to bring value to our Iota Community through providing information on the new coins, tokens, and projects evolving as well as creating opportunities for new community members to learn about Iota. In order to do that I needed to grow my following and diversify my content and my twitter activities. I learned from other Twitter influencers some of their best practices, kept asking myself how do I bring value to others, and put my marketing skills to work.
IP: Which Shimmer project are you looking forward to the most once the ShimmerEVM drops?
DP: I love the Soonaverse….it’s so gritty and so Iota with good people, growing pains, and an amazing vision. I can’t wait to see what that community grows into. As a real estate professional who deals with lending a lot, I am fascinated to see how the Iota Shimmer ecosystem is about to play a role in the evolution of lending. LendeXe and some of the other projects in development came first to mind. Gaming is another one. I follow the UFO Gaming token and community and I have high hopes that something fun and exciting will evolve from or migrate to Shimmer in the gaming space (hint UFO folks! Get off Ethereum! ;p)
IP: What motivates you to stay engaged with the IOTA/Shimmer community even during the bear market?
DP: Easy — the Iota vision, the passionate authentic and super intelligent Iota people, the Iota technology all of which are fun and fascinating.
IP: Which guest would you love to hear on the Moonaco Podcast?
DP: Easy — I want Kutkraft to interview Thomas!! No holds barred full on early days of the Iota community back stories, trials, tyrants, heroes, tribulations, ternary, Jin, all the crazy outlandish genius that brings us to today! — reattach, reattach, REATTACH!!!! LFG!
IP: Where can we find you?
DP: You can find Digidus on Twitter @DigidusPrime and Discord @Digidus#1268
Learn more about the King of the $hitcoins $DGPR at digidus.com