🥛 Are Nouns the next big thing?

GM. This is the Milk Road, where we take the best crypto ingredients from the day to make a fresh new treat for you every morning.

Estimated read time: 2 minutes and 49 seconds

• 🍪 Bite-sized cookies

• 👀 Are Nouns the next big thing?

• 🏧 Is crypto banking the unbanked?

• 📊 Chart of the day

BITE-SIZED COOKIES

Crypto funds sold $141M worth of crypto this past week, according to the latest CoinShares report. Bitcoin saw the lion's share of the sell-off with a total of $150M.

Lockheed Martin is partnering with Filecoin to build a blockchain network in space. The idea is to focus on the emerging “space economy” and reduce latency when downloading data from locations like the moon.

Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, has bought more than $75M worth of Coinbase shares over the last few days. Looks like Fred is loving the dip and is betting big his company can execute.

The Luna story continues: South Korean police are making moves to freeze Luna Foundation Guards' money as they continue their investigation. The plot thickens for Do Kwon.

ARE NOUNS THE NEXT BIG THING?

Have you seen Nouns? It’s dope. They’ve sold over $100M+ worth of NFTs.

In fact, it’s even crazier. They sell 1 Noun every 24 hours. The avg one sells for ~$100k-$200k.

For example, here’s yesterday’s Noun:

Why Nouns is an interesting NFT blueprint:

1/ The Nouns are a CC0 project

CC0 basically means you give up all copyrights to your Noun (aka anyone can use your Noun without your permission).

I know what you’re thinking… .why the f*ck would anyone want to do this? The whole point of NFTs is that I’m supposed to own the IP and monetize it myself, right?

Yeah sure, that’s one way to look at it. But do you know how hard it is to actually build and market a brand from scratch? Pretty damn hard.

But with CC0, you’re letting other people do the building and marketing for you.

Here’s an example: Jack Butcher (the visualize value guy) made a Nouns hat without anyone's permission and sold 167 of them in 69 minutes.

So the Nouns did nothing but still got a few hundred new eyes on their IP. It’s permissionless.

2/ It's a great flywheel: every time a Noun is sold, the treasury gets more money that’s then used to fund the growth of the brand

By owning a Noun, you’re a part of Nouns DAO.

The DAO currently has $48m to spend to market Nouns and build projects around them and turn Nouns into the next big thing (that’s a big ass marketing budget).

100% of all Noun sales go into the treasury. So it’s growing by $100 - $200k, every single day.

Some of the cooler projects that got funded recently:

Nouns x Madhappy Apparel - it's all in the name - a Nouns x Madhappy collab apparel drop.

Budget = 100ETH (~200k)

Nouns Around Town Documentary Film - a comedic documentary film about NounsDAO that will be directed by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (the creators for Robot Chicken). There will also be a Nouns float built for the Pasadena Rose Parade & 6 life-size Noun costumes made to go around and randomly take pictures with people. Because why not?

Budget = 610 ETH (~$1.2M)

Nouns Esports Team - sponsoring a professional Dota2 gaming team. This includes a team name change to NounsDota, signing the players and coaches for the upcoming season, and having each rebrand to have the nouns glasses next to their gamer name (i.e ChefPuri ⌐◨-◨)

Budget = 35 ETH (~$70k)

Nouns CC0 Story Foundations & Development - building 6 Story Bibles for Nouns. Each Story bible will include a general world/universe outline, 15-20 Characters w/ illustrations and character descriptions, and 10+ story/episode ideas.

Budget = 148 ETH (~$300k)

Nouns Sunglasses - IRL luxury Nouns glasses

Budget = 115ETH + a noun (~$360k)

LilNouns - a mini version of the OG Nouns. A new Lil Nouns auction is held every 15 minutes. Forever. This is more budget-friendly for this with smaller budgets (LilNouns have been going for 0.7-0.8 ETH a pop). They also have their own DAO - LilNounsDAO that already has 642ETH in their treasury.

The Milk Road’s Take: I love the way the DAO is taking funding to try and grow the brand.

I think the most impressive part is how strong the demand is for the daily noun. It’s really hard to find a buyer for a $100k nft every single day.

IS CRYPTO BANKING THE UNBANKED?

The Fed (boooooo!!!) released their yearly Economic Well-Being of Americans Report. This year we saw a new topic of questions on the survey: crypto.

A few numbers popped out:

• 12% of Americans held or used assets like BTC or ETH in transactions last year

• 13% of people that use crypto for transactions do not have a bank account

• 27% of people that use use crypto for transactions do not have a credit card

So is crypto actually banking the unbanked? Let's look at the breakdown of the countries with the most unbanked adults in the world:

Bitcoin is legal tender in two (Central Africa Republic and El Salvador) countries so far, so it’s a start. And a handful of other countries are actively looking into crypto as a currency (highlighted yellow).

It’s easy to get lost in crypto, but remember, this is one of the biggest promises: to actually make a better infrastructure for digital money!

CHART OF THE DAY

MEME OF THE DAY

Shaan aka “Elon’s chocolate milk” & Ben "2% Milk" Levy

See ya tomorrow!

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DISCLAIMER:

None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.