No Funging Allowed • CEO Letter #16
Hey now, you're an all star, and I'm Taylor, CEO of Hedgehog, here with another nonfungible newsletter! That's right, every edition is different 😏 And today, once again, is NFT Day. Governments across the world will make the official announcement soon, and I fully expect today to be a national holiday five years from now.
As I remind you every week, Hedgehog is a cryptocurrency portfolio manager for tracking and trading your investments across different wallets and exchanges. No more gnarly spreadsheets, no more juggling browser tabs. Just one easy website where all the info you need lives in a single spot 🦔
But I'm the CEO so of course I think it's great. Please keep kicking the tires and sharing feedback with the team on Discord 🙏 We appreciate it so much. Speaking of which, don't forget there’s a giveaway at the end of the newsletter.
Film composer Gregg Leonard realized that NFTs can be used as next-generation intellectual property licenses, putting power back into the hands of artists. Imagine if you could unlock a movie by purchasing an NFT, with a percentage of the price automatically sent to the creatives whose ideas made the story compelling.
Royalties and residuals do exist in the conventional film industry, but negotiating contract concessions, then hounding someone to write the actual check, can be a harrowing process. Smart contracts offer automated assurances to all parties:
Above the gobsmacking prices and unusual items, what appealed to Leonard was the potential for NFTs to be used as a tool for super-safe registration of copyright and to create a new pay model for creators.
"You're dealing with the decentralized registration of the blockchain," says Leonard. "That's immutable registration."
So Leonard decided to put his latest score on the blockchain: "All the different aspects of intellectual property that make up a film project, like a screenplay, can have an NFT strategy to them that will help finance the film and help the independent film world right now."
Tldr: One of my degrees was actually in film, so this is near and dear to my heart, and I'm loving how crypto can make such an impact across industries.
More news:
- Print-on-demand NFTs so your blockchain swag can hit the streets with you. Neat idea! One could say… nifty 😎
- "A Guide to Designing Effective NFT Launches" from researchers at Paradigm, a crypto-focused VC firm. Comprehensive analysis of the economic dynamics at play in NFT drops.
- TikTok's NFT campaign hasn't even launched, though it was supposed to, and it already sounds like a flop. Bummer.
- Investor Chris Burniske: "NFTs today are akin to ICOs in 2017. It doesn't mean they're not important; it just means lots of value is being predicated on promises. Execution will be painful, the strongest will emerge stronger, the flimsy promises will fall flat."
- Hopium sanity check from Annika Lewis: "In DAOs, as with anything, you get out what you put in — and, in today's environment while it's still early days, the hustle is necessary." Stay on that grind baby 💪
Tldr: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the DAOest of them all? No seriously, who? You haven't been talking to that evil queen, right?
Currently, to buy milk with ETH — I'd have to send some to an exchange, liquidate it, and wire the money to my bank account.
Swype took this and made it one step simpler — you could just liquidate it on the spot, without the exchange & wire.
This isn't good enough.
There are still two problems to this approach.
1. Every liquidation is considered a taxable event
2. You are potentially selling an appreciating asset, when you could just use your depreciating fiat.
Here's how Swype hits both these birds with a single stone
1. When you want to spend $$ at the point of sale, Swype will provide a crypto backed loan in a stable coin. (DAI, USDC). You can live completely off crypto, and borrow against your assets without any custodian.
2. A contract running on Ethereum locks your crypto assets in escrow, giving you digital dollars to spend in return
3. When ready to receive your escrowed assets back — send the digital dollars back to the contract — unlocking the crypto asset back to your wallet.
4. This results in no tax implications whatsoever.
A liability can never be taxed. You can hold crypto assets, but still spend dollars against them, without ever needing to go back to fiat and incur capital gains.
Clever, right? Hat tip to David McDougall. If you decide to join the Swype waitlist and end up getting in, let me know how it goes!
Tldr: Step 1: Swype On. Step 2: Swype Off. Step 3: Learn Karate.
Giveaway question of the week: What should we cover next on the Hedgeblog? Suggest a topic 🤓 Just reply to this email with your answer and you’ll be entered to win a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet.
Still not giving away ETH,
Taylor
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Header photo by Tim Green.