SHILL Issue12

SHILL
SOLANA NFT/DEFI/TWITTER COMMUNITY
SaintEclectic
A short history of minting on Solana.
SHILL the MINT
Full colour spread of some mints from
the past weeks.
ISSUE #12
ISSUE #12
0.025 ◎
YOU WANT ALPHA?
So what exactly is @alexhitchcroft
bullish about?

In THIS
ISSUE
12
2
PIXELTOY Magz
SHILL Issue #12

4
Saint
Eclectic
A short history of minting on
Solana.
10
14
15
NFT DEGENZ
JohnWickedOut shares his
new Spotify podcast. Eps6
AUDIUS PLAYLIST
NEW! Send your AUDIUS
playlist to
pixeltoy.sol@gmail.com
to be featured.
SHILL the Mint
NFT highlights.
20
22
25
26
30
You Want ALPHA?
@theWOOFerine spills the
beans!
The Solana Plug
@linkkzyy launches a site for
quality NFT launches.
SOLanalysis
Tope Gainers Top News
Regular feature from TheX-
Astronait and SolanaNews
HOLAPLEX SPOTLIGHT
Fresh new offerings for the
mid-week
@Sol_Skull
Boring Protocol Limited Edition
SHILL Issue #12 3

The Saint
ECLECTIC
At the @solanaconf @redacted_j went through the history,
present and future of @metaplex, the decentralized protocol
that allows artists, brands and creators launch a self-hosted
NFT storefront. It’s basically what powers Solana NFTs today.
Some history, and then the future.
Before we begin, this thread is part of a collab with
@sinoglobalcap’s @sallywang666 & @cryptoflowpost’s
summary of @solanaconf.
A large part of this thread summarizes @redacted_j’s
presentation @SolanaConfwith some of my thoughts.
Back to Metaplex.
This picture was the first NFT minted on Metaplex. A picture
of industry OGs @redacted_jand @baalazamon(“B+J”) at their
former employer. In May 2021 they built the original metaplex
contract in 2 weeks, with other OGs @stphnhss,
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@Austin_Federa and @
nkumar23.
Solana initially focused on
defi, but it was becoming
clear that NFTs were the
most engaging way to
onboard the next 100 million
crypto / platform users and
so @aeyakovenko and
@rajgokal asked the team to
put together an NFT platform
in 6 weeks.
Up until the Metaplex
storefront there were limited
ways to launch NFTs on @
solana. No mega drop had
happened yet.
@SolanaMBS used a wallet where they accepted your SOL
and you had to pray that you’d get your NFT back the next day.
(Boy were you rewarded if you did though!)
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The first serious 10k drop post @metaplex was the
@degenapeacademy. But it almost didn’t happen. On a Friday
11pm after a 16 hour day B+J got a call from Raj. DAA had
minted ~800 tokens but half of them were blank. The minting
solution deployed produced duplicates & did not work.
What happened next - for all your ape & Sol NFT lovers - was
the stuff of legend. B+J rewrote the DAA NFT mint code
almost line by line, building what would be the first iteration of
Candy Machine. 12 hours to save a drop without having done
this before. No problem.
The solution? - Fully off chain minting: where you’d pay in SOL
and the receipt would be stored in the Redis with an assigned
# - The Redis increase function meant that whenever the next
person called the contract, you’d get the next # sequentially.
Degen Apes sold out in minutes and at one point they had
1,000 Google Cloud instances running to handle the stress
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load. This illustrated how well Solana scales because the
network was able to handle the load - though it required 1,000
cloud instances to handle the demand.
The moral of the story? Well, @redacted_j stated that “even
decentralized networks need heroes. people that deeply care
and deploy resources”.
He humbly declared @rajgokalthe hero. Raj did not have to
step in but he did. You see, what was at stake was whether
Solana could prove itself to be a viable NFT chain. With B+J’s
help they rescued the @DegenApeAcademy drop.
After that day, Solana’s status as a viable NFT chain would not
be in doubt. DAA’s launch was a marker in Solana history. B+J
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advised the team to kill the initial ~800 tokens, but the team
didn’t. This caused issues that would eventually lead to further
innovation - more later.
But that wasn’t the end of B+J’s sleep deprivation. 24 hours after
B+J saved the apes they were called in to save @SollamasNFT.
No rest for the wicked. The project dropped 10,000 llamas but
only to 25% of buyers. Some did not receive any and some
received more than they paid for.
With the failed drop they had suddenly created a two-tier society
- the “Lla-mores” and the “Llama-less”. The rich clutched their
4x llamas to their chest and declared the mint fair: “just go
and buy what you want on secondary!” The have-nots lost their
minds in discord.
So, sleep deprived B+J came up with a crafty plan to right
the ship. It would take all minters through a rollercoaster of
emotions over the next 5 hours and could arguably carry out
the first “performance art” NFT drop in history. They would
teach the hoarding have-nots a lesson.
Unlike Degen Apes 800 ‘exiled’ tokens, Sollamas had an exiled
problem 10,000 strong. So, they had to be killed. Enter “Tuco”
solicons.holaplex.com
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the Ugly, the eponymous bad guy from the Western “The Good,
The Bad and the Ugly”. Tuco was out for some blood.
B+J still had update authority on the tokens. They built a timed
loop to convert the NFTs into graves The llamas were gradually
murdered over 5 hours. B+J then instructed the Sollama devs
to go dark. Trolls. Thanks guys, I was there in the discord and I
thought I was rugged.
At first 1 or 2 people noticed their llamas were graves, but
they were screamed down by others for fudding - “NFTs are
immutable!”. Not quite. At 10% of Tuco’s murder spree, minters
started using NFTeyez to track their llamas and they got scared.
By 30%, as @redacted_j put it, there was a “flowering of religion”
as people tried to figure out why some llamas were dying and
some weren’t. Some tried to move their NFT to a ledger hard
wallet. None were spared.
Every 25th killed llama was dropped a “Tuco” token. Suddenly
death cults emerged, encouraging Tuco to kill faster & speed up
a re-mint for all. By 80% everyone realized death was inevitable
and accepted its warm embrace. Code as art, imitating a
religious pantomime. Beautiful.
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NFT DEGENZ
AKA
@JohnWickdout
Anything and everything related
to Solana NFTs. From minting,
to exploring projects, predicting
markets, to seeing where this
goes big picture. It’s going to be
an exciting ride and I’m happy
to take you all along for the ride!
Episode 6
In episode 6, a market
analysis of Solana NFTs.
A brief project overview on
residency type projects:
Solsteads, TowerDAO,
Metahomes, NeoNexus
and the Neighbourhood.
https://anchor.fm/millz43/support
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@AuroryProject was next and they did not know what was
coming for them. After the boom of DAA (which saw apes list
8x their initial mint) everyone was on the minting gravy train
and there were 300,000 simultaneous requests to mint.
Candymachine was rolled out for Aurory and after that it became
the norm & standard for other NFT projects. Yet there
was still a problem with the Candy machine rollout... As with
most things, people always find a way to game the system,
and that problem was... Bots. Bots which spam minted and
bought up large supply of mints. Metaplex’s solution was the
Fair Launch Protocol: each bid would come with a non-refundable
fee and be gated in stages & make it unprofitable for bots
trying to spam. The fees so far have gone to charities.
What other innovations are on the horizon?
Auction house: - No more NFT escrows, you keep your token
in your wallet at all times & maintain eligibility for airdrops -
Allows for NFT bids - Might even be able to place your NFT at
multiple sites to see which lands the best sale.
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The future
Fanout wallets:
where one wallet can have many tokens that can be shared
permissionless with various holders. Think of it like a treasury
distributing tokens.
Token entangler:
where you can pair any NFT with another permanently Only
one can exist outside escrow at one time, so this is useful for
fixing broken collections without burning This could be, for
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instance, used to “repair” the exiled Degen Ape tokens that
still exist today.
While the old token doesn’t have update authority so can’t be
fixed, it could be entangled with a new one that represents a
“cleaned up” token. You only get the “cleaned up” one if you
escrow your original broken token.
NFT packs:
where you can exchange n NFTs for m NFTs and enables
randomized card packs, enabling collectors Collections: will
be added so you’ll be able to subscribe to a given collection
and secondaries can use this point to call your NFT (like
Opensea)
Whew that was a lot to go through. Can you believe all this
happened in four months?
Imagine what’s coming next.
anon.nft are you ready?
SHILL Issue #12 13

AUDIUS PLAYLISTS
This is YOUR space! A place for you to share with our readers what
you are listening to on AUDIUS.
Send your playlist to:
pixeltoy.sol@gmail.com
to be included in the next issue.
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SHILL
MINT
the
@DarkSolArt
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Chimp Fight
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Flunk Donkey
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MadTrooper
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MIM Swarmer
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You want
ALPHA?
WOOF
@theWOOFerine
If anyone didn’t know this, a really easy way to refine
by rank for @galacticgeckosg is by jumping on
https://solanafloor.com and seeing the listed prices
that way. Quick way to snipe some deals.
Get on it fam!
$WOOF $WOOF
It’s funny how shortsighted
some people are. #solana
will be the #1 platform
for gaming and NFTs. It’s
not an if it’s a wen.
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@Linkkzyy
THE
SOLANA
PLUG
Host of @DownunderPC | @TheAlphaDAO
My Current Position on NFTs Right now I believe at least
on $SOL we’re still facing a crisis of sorts. Without blowing
it out of proportion like everything is hitting the fan,
I’m less concerned about where we are now rather than
where we are headed. I’ll dive into this.
The Standards of Solana. There are a few angles I want
to look at this from. 1. The projects, be it design or ambitions
in themselves. 2. The people who oddly engage in
these things. 3. How we can potentially find a fix or move
towards something better.
Crypto is inherently decentralized and that’s what makes
it so beautiful and so freeing. However, I do believe even in
a decentralized world we have our own social paradigms
and our social standards. In my eyes, there’s a total lack of
business standards in NFTs.
See, as NFTs are inherently a business in themselves the
real money comes from big investors. The issue is SOL
projects are not acting like brands or business’s. These
big investors are generally invested in 2 things, Branding
(@BoredApeYC) or Tech (@GenesysGo)
Projects are being planned on Monday and minted on Friday
and the issue realistically is, PEOPLE ARE CONSUM-
ING THEM. Accountability should be held on projects to
attempt greater and higher things than, pixel art and grape
verification + listing on secondary.
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#TheAlphaDAO
However, this cannot be controlled as I said - Decentralized.
But the consumption of subpar projects most certainly
can and will create a much higher standard and
probably reduce the victims of rugs in-light of the last bull
runs losses.
2.0 Engagement and Consumption. This is where it becomes
important for social motifs and standards. See,
no two people will always agree w/ the beauty of art it is
inherently subjective. Thus, there will always be someone
potentially who really vibes with something. Mint it.
However, If you’ve decided you want to flip NFTs it is now
upon the community to make money. I’ve watched projects
with amazing utility, crazy roadmaps and stacked
teams struggle to or not sell out. This disappoints me but
my feelings aren’t people’s concerns.
You want to make money! Rightfully so, we all do. The reason
you’re not making money right now is because people
are equally participating in minting 3-day projects, panic
selling because someone else sold so the next guy sells
and now your down money.
The simple way to solve this problem. Stop consuming
shit. Consume good projects, with good communities and
good teams and good intentions. Tomorrow alone there’s
roughly 40 mints. F O R T Y. That’s essential forty kick
starter campaigns.
I know I don’t control any market or decisions and I implore
you to mint what YOU want to mint. Not what I tell
you I like, not what big brain tells you, not what fxnction
tells you. Mint what you believe in and can hold through
draw backs and pumps.
The fix to this is establishing a higher standard, one where
a project has to offer something a community can build
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around. A community strong enough to really love what
they have and really want it OR Utilities so useful it’s worth
holding for as long as you can.
At the end of the day, most people are here for money. Not
community or technology. But if you want to make money
as a consumer, BUILDING a COMMUNITY is in your best
interest. If you want your project to sell out, INNOVATION
is in your best interest.
- Content being produced right now is utterly disappointing.
- Consumption is only encouraging it - Most money
comes from consumers engaging heavily and production
of high-quality brands and ideas. 30/70 SPLIT. - Mint what
you want, not what old mate says.
Future issues without change? Simple, perma bear market
and then a market collapse. So many crypto babies
are drawn to SOL, they have no idea how to handle market
pressure. Without better content we get less migration of
whales, less whales means less pump.
Less pump means less money in our ecosystem. Right
now, we see the effects of less money in our ecosystem,
stagnant mints, dropping floors, crumbling communities.
Higher standards got to be placed or shit projects take
millions in funding and don’t reinvest it.
You may disagree but, this is a position I hold extremely
strongly and debated even discussing. The ecosystem
can’t survive without new infrastructure and professional
business engagement. Projects dming me don’t even
have the effort to write a decent pitch...
I know someone’s going to get mad or upset but I think this
is the truth. The crypto space is decentralized by some
standards can be set and should be set, rugs are going to
get way worse in this bull run if we don’t make a change.
I’m talking 20M + gone in 1 run ez.
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SOLANALYSIS
7D volume
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Top GAINERS / Top 10
The Astronaut @thexastronaut
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Fried says solana is better
than ethereum as it's one
of the few networks able to
handle mass adoption
Camomile Shumba
•FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried said solana was one of the few
blockchains with a roadmap to scale million of transactions.
•Not a lot of other blockchains including ethereum are focused
on scale he said at the Yahoo Finance conference Tuesday.
•Bitcoin sometimes comes under fire for not being able to
accommodate many real-use cases.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the 29-year old that heads up the FTX
exchange, believes solana is better than ethereum as it’s one of the
few blockchains with a plan to accommodate mass adoption.
Bankman-Fried has a net worth of $22.5 billion thanks to his crypto
business, which makes him the youngest person to enter the Forbes
rich list after Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.
He spoke at Yahoo Finance and Decrypts’s “Crypto Goes Mainstream”
conference on Tuesday about how the biggest upside of the solana
network is its ability to handle an enormous amount of users and
transactions.
Solana is a decentralized finance (DeFi) peer-to-peer network that
many have billed as an “ethereum killer”, based on its quicker
transaction speed and lower fees when compared to its larger rival.
The network can run 60,000 transactions per second at $0.0015 per
transaction, while ethereum handles just 17,000 at a cost of $5.80
each.
“Solana is one of the few currently existing public blockchains that
has a really plausible roadmap to scale millions of transactions per
second at you know, fractions of a penny per transaction, which is a
scale that you need for this,” Bankman-Fried said.
“That is not where a lot of other blockchains have been focusing,
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including ethereum.”
Solana launched in April 2020 and its token has risen by almost
16,000% so far this year. It’s now the fifth biggest cryptocurrency
by market value, with a capitalization of $73 billion, according to
Coinmarketcap.
Ether, the native token of the ethereum network, launched in 2015
and so has had a bit of a head-start relative to other DeFi tokens. The
network gives users the option to build applications over it such as
non-fungible tokens, send payments and execute smart contracts,
among others. It’s risen by over 500% to record highs close to $5,000
this year, as users have flocked to the network.
Bankman-Fried said that a mass scale application business would
need to be able to accommodate hundreds of millions to billions of
users and transactions per second.
“That millions of transactions per second, is really a requirement of
any mass scale system,” Bankman-Fried said.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, is the most traded cryptocurrency and is
gradually entering the financial mainstream. However, its network
for now doesn’t offer the same flexibility and scalability of say,
ethereum. And transactions are a lot slower and more expensive,
while its carbon footprint has been a source of concern for climateconscious
investors.
SHILL Issue #12 29

@nicolllf
conciencia.holaplex.com
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Holaplex
@0xlxxr
museo.holaplex.com
SHILL Issue #12 31

SHILL
zine
COVER: Apesy