Laser eyes, Sysiphus, and Pandora’s box

Story One

Laser eyes

Laser eye’s making a comeback wasn’t exactly on my 2024 bingo card. Life is full of surprises, and so is Joe Biden. 

On February 11th, he posted a picture of himself featuring laser eyes referencing a conspiracy theory that stated the Super Bowl (the major media event where 22 men run after a Papaya-shaped ball and tackle each other ruthlessly) would be rigged to make sure that the team with Taylor Swift’s boyfriend wins – so that she could endorse Biden for president. 

Conspiracies aside, the crypto crowd quickly called this cultural appropriation. After all, laser eyes are a symbol rocked by Bitcoiners to signal to “all the single ladies” who they shouldn’t let put a ring on it, to paraphrase Beyonce. In 2021, laser eyes symbolized perma bulls who believed Bitcoin would hit $100k by the end of the year. As this failed to happen, the lasers slowly disappeared. 

Speaking of laser eyes, Biden wasn’t the only one. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, spent over $600k to purchase a JPEG of a rock with laser eyes and is using it as his profile picture. 

Takeaway: Will laser eyes stay, who knows? Crypto isn’t one to neglect old trends; after all, Bitcoin Wizards embrace the magic internet meme rather successfully, and that one is more than ten years old.  ????

Story Two

Sysiphus

It all seemed to go so well for Solana. BONK propelled their lackluster Saga phone sales to new heights, and they hadn’t experienced an outage for more than 330 days. But, as the good German proverb goes, “everything has an end; only the sausage has two.” 

Solana’s uptime streak ended on February 7th when no transactions were processed for 5 hours. The outage was caused by a previously known bug that resulted in infinite loops. Infinite loops are a coding error that occurs when you set up a loop where the terminating condition is never met. They are fun when you learn to code and freeze your system. It turns out they do the same for chains. 

When the infinite loop was triggered, validators were stuck in a continuous cycle of trying to process the same block over and over again in a modern interpretation of Sysiphus’ tragic tale. Unfortunately, this prevented them from doing their actual work of confirming new transactions, the thing blockchains are supposed to do. 

The SOL price quickly dipped but has recovered since. Even better, pre-orders for the 2nd Solana phone reached 100,000, meaning the foundation now has an additional $45 million in cash. 

Takeaway: This was the sixth outage for Solana, yet it remains a regular among the top 5 tokens by market cap. We have to cut them some slack for that. They are in the arena, trying things, and some fail. 

Story Three

Pandora’s Box

Pandora, the first woman on Earth, owned a box containing all the world’s evils. Obviously, it was unleashed and gave us, among other things, HEX. One crypto project now decided that Pandora was a great name for their project, so here we are: contemplating Greek mythology in a space that otherwise does not seem to learn from history. 

Pandora (the project, not Greek lady) is the first to run with a new experimental token standard, fittingly called ERC-404. It combines the existing Ethereum standards for fungible and non-fungible tokens, allowing the creation of so-called “semi-fungibles.”

In other words, NFTs can be fractionalized from the start with this new standard. While splitting NFTs into a set amount of tokens and distributing them has existed before, the process always involved locking the original NFT and issuing new tokens. With ERC-404, multiple wallets can own a single NFT directly, removing the need to fractionalize NFTs manually. Pandora has had success with it, with tokens trading as high as $32k, up from $250 the week before. 

Takeaway: Experiments are part of crypto. If you decide to partake, that’s on you. I, for one, abstain. We know what happened to the world after Pandora opened that box, and I don’t want to risk the same happening to my wallet.

Fact of the week: If you’re looking for a name for your crypto project instead of Pandora, why not go with Hestia? She was the Greek Goddess of the Home and the Olympic Torch. The torch symbolizes the importance of her fire, lighting up torches along the way until the final Olympic flame is lit. ????If your project lights a fire in people, you’ll be winning.

Naomi for CoinJar

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