Thanks to the 3 new people who subscribed since my last letter!
Merry Christmas to all 13 of you 🌲 🎅
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To: Lilpurpberry, Georgie, & Blueberry DAO
Congrats on hosting an incredible Variety x Nouns Christmas party for the kids in need!
I wish mainstream media outlets and traditional journalists would talk about crypto initiatives like this: positive, inspiring, & for the community.
Watching the video highlights was such a blast and the event looked amazing 🔥
A few days ago, Chris Carella shared Prop 420 with me on Farcaster. I was blown away by the write up and loved everything about it. It was a no brainer to me that my next letter I would write would be for all of you who took the initiative to do this.
I loved seeing the Nouns treasury be used for something so different than the software projects crypto Twitter is used to. In a letter I recently wrote to Drew & Derek (Prop 450), I said:
The truth is, the idea of doing an IRL project sounds daunting to most of us who live on crypto twitter. Dealing with paperwork, acquiring a shop, managing operations, hiring staffers, etc. But we need someone to take on a big challenge like this, so thank you for stepping up 💯
And the same message applies in this situation. To actually take the funding and partner with Variety, order all the merch, get the decorations ready, etc. requires a lot of effort and it's incredible to see how it came together.
What's great about doing a Nouns project is that you automatically know that you're using Nouns branded assets and that takes away a lot of the friction from just getting started. The creativity part lies in figuring out how you're going to plug in the Nouns brand into the project you're doing. And of course, that's a skill in itself. It requires good taste and making sure that there's proper balance. There were some comments in the voting process mentioning that it's important to not force the brand on anyone. I think it's a valid callout, but based on the video I believe all of you did an awesome job of seamlessly integrating Nouns into the Christmas party.
Lilpurpberry, until I dug deeper into prop 420, I had no idea you were were a 13 year old pixel artist! What a fantastic example of how literally anyone can use Nouns-as-a-service. Age, ethnicity, location, etc. doesn't matter. As long as you're passionate about something and want to make an impact, you can just go for it.
I also loved learning about BlueberryDAO and the mission you all are working on:
I started Blueberry DAO to support kids less fortunate than me and to do good with no expectation of return. I believe that supporting kids charities and initiatives that help kids in need is important because it creates a better future for all of us. When we invest in children's education, health, and well-being, we are investing in the future of our communities.
Bridging together your passion for helping kids in need and your excitement for Nouns, DAOs, & crypto is something many others in the space can learn from. How can you take a pre-existing hobby or passion of yours and try to creatively incorporate crypto values? It's these authentic experiences that will bring people who have no reason to care about crypto all of a sudden get excited about what all this new technology has to offer.
Crypto Positivity
Chris asked the following question in Farcaster and to be honest I don't think anyone had a good answer.
Imagine seeing the Variety Nouns event highlighted in the NYT or WSJ? A headline like "Crypto funded Christmas party for 5000 kids in need".
The truth is that it doesn't make sense for traditional journalists to be talking about what's actually happening in crypto. It doesn't fit their "click metrics" model and help drive more traffic. None of these traditional journalists are spending time onchain. Most have probably never even minted an NFT or even realize that there are proposals all across crypto where people are getting their hands dirty and making a positive impact in society.
But that doesn't mean folks in the crypto community can't be reframing the angle and trying our best to spread the message.
What are the cool crypto funded initiatives?
What's actually happening onchain?
How can we share things in crypto past prices, scandals, & hacks?
The more we write about, make videos, etc. on all the amazing things happening in the ecosystem, the more the chances of mainstream folks learning about positive crypto events increases. Hopefully I did my part with this letter and one person who didn't know about Prop 420 reads this and gets inspired about the good crypto can do
Once again, great job to everyone who played part in making this Nouns Christmas Party a reality.
Merry Christmas to anyone reading!
- YB
