Hello!
It’s been almost ten days since we officially launched the FLAN pool and everything has been going much smoother than expected. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reading the letter to future delegators that I wrote you, though it’s not a necessity.
At the time of writing, we’re sitting pretty with a live stake of 283,557 ADA. At this rate, we’ll shortly get to the coveted 1-1.5m range where we’ll regularly mint blocks. I’m not taking success for granted though, as the first million is likely to be quite tough.
In either case, in this article, we’ll be covering the different facets of FLAN and how we’re going to be working for the Flan Clan and the wider Cardano ecosystem.
Flan Pool Giveaways
Tomorrow, the 10th of June, we will announce the first winner of the initial onboarding giveaway. One of the lucky early delegators to the pool will receive the Raspberry Crusader.
In order to decide the winner, we have marked every ADA delegated to the FLAN pool as a ticket for a raffle. That said, given that we have one delegator in particular who accounts for 64.07% of the pool, and most other delegators are under 10k ADA we have capped the influence ADA has on this boundary.
So the distribution looks like a lazy S, or a Sigmoid function if you want to be fancy and technical about it. Meaning that whether you delegated 10k or 1m ADA, you still have the same chances of winning.
We want to make the FLAN pool work for everyone, so every delegator should in time be able to receive a reward, while still benefiting delegators who’ve invested more. Of course, we will also have whale-specific incentives, but those are separate from the main rewards.
This reward distribution function will be used to pick random winners going forward, although the maximum cap may be adjusted up or down depending on the number of delegators and active stake.
We will have at least one giveaway a month, and our goal is to have a raffle once per epoch. However, as the flans are hand-drawn by Mori Mochi, she is unlikely to be able to handle that pace (and would likely want to shove flans up my ass by the end of the first month if I push her too hard). To that end, we would like to partner with artists.
NFT Artist Partnerships
An issue that a lot of skilled artists encounter is that while they have the talent to succeed, they might not have the necessary platform to attract an audience. As such, the FLAN pool is looking to partner with up and coming or established artists and to feature them prominently.
The partnership would be in the form of one Flan NFT drawn in their style, which will be given away to Flan Clan delegators. During this time, we’ll shout them out, give them the stage, and interview them (once I get the recording system and Youtube running that is). This will introduce the artist’s work to a new community and allow them to bolster their own following.
Besides that, if they so choose, they can also airdrop their own NFTs to Flan Clan delegators in order to increase liquidity and earn royalties in the aftermarket. These secondary airdrops can be done on whichever conditions they desire, such as that the Flan Clan audience follows them to be eligible for them, for instance.
The broader point is that FLAN pool wants to leverage its audience to be able to promote artists while also being able to reward delegators.
So far, we have two projects on board for the initial stages:
- The artists for the Hosky Cash Grab NFTs (@TheBigLeHosky and @danksy__) who will create a Flan in their style, while also adding Flan as a trait in the Hosky NFTs.
- Dapper Raptors, which are a new project that recently sold out their first season, and are exploring new ways of making NFTs to be compatible with other artworks.
All in all, we are excited about featuring an ever-growing talent pool and encourage any artist to DM me to work with you for the promotion.
Seasonal Flans & next generation of Flan Clan NFTs
As you may well know, the first mint of Flan Clan NFTs went exceedingly well. We sold out within minutes and the aftermarket sales have vastly exceeded our expectations.
‘Generation 0’, as we called our first attempt at NFTs, proved to be quite successful. So much so that having a flan has become a bit of a luxury, and people have even gone through the trouble of making lore, fan art, roleplay Twitter accounts and Flan knock-offs.
For the immediate future, we will mainly be focusing on small, limited and festive releases, which we are likely to auction off. This month, we will auction off a small Pride Flan collection, wherein half of the profits will go to the Trevor Project (a charity focusing on suicide prevention efforts among LGBT youth).
The other portion of funds will be used to fund the next generation of Flans. I hesitate to go into proper detail, as it’s still very early days on that front. But our intention is to be able to create bespoke flans at a bigger scale while retaining their uniqueness and incorporating them into a text-based, evolving game – in a style that has yet to be tried on Cardano.
We want to take NFTs into underexplored areas and play around with the full potential of the format, but while keeping our ambitions constrained by what is possible within the tools and talents that we have available.
I’ve already contacted Patrick, the founder of NFT Maker, to discuss some of the details of implementation and we’ll begin breaking ground on the project shortly.
Customized Whale Flans
Given that we have capped the maximum influence that any specific wallet can have on the giveaways, we would like to do something exclusively for the whales. People who delegate over 100k ADA for one month are eligible for a customized flan, which will be hand-drawn by Mori Mochi and to their specifications.
If you are a whale who wants to have this exclusive custom NFT, you can message me at [email protected] with a throwaway email to protect your privacy. Then, as proof of your identity, you can send yourself 3.14 ADA from your delegated wallet, and share the transaction ID in the email.
After these factors have been verified, we can talk about your unique artwork and begin work on it.
Charity
With the success of the Flan Clan, we have begun to be a bit more ambitious about our goals. We are still not making any life-changing amounts of revenue and it’s still by no means self-sustaining from a financial point of view, but we see the potential there.
To that end, I’d like to put the framework in place for when we are in a position to help.
In regards to the upcoming limited and festive Flan Clan NFT releases, we intend on auctioning them off and earmarking for charity half of the profit derived from those auctions. These particular charities will be of both mine and Mori Mochi’s choosing.
Besides that, half of the royalties from the secondary market sales of the stakepool & artist partnership NFTs will go to charity as well. The goal is that the Flan Clan community takes an active role in deciding where these funds get allocated.
Ideally, this decision will be made every time the funds reach a pre-agreed threshold, and we decide whom to donate to via weighted on-chain voting. The weighted voting would work similarly to the giveaway raffle that we mentioned in the prior sections, but with the addition of on-chain voting infrastructure that is being trialled by the Ada Ape Wild Warrior’s project.
Discord
The Flan Pool aims to become so much more than just another endlessly replaceable stakepool. We want to become a creative hub for the Cardano community.
To that end, we are aiming to open a Discord. However, it’ll be more targeted than other communities.
We aim to have sections to share work from the community, for the community. We want to encourage people to be creative in their art and BUIDL things that they are passionate about, whether that’s writing articles, drawing, storytelling, sculpting, cooking, you name it!
Overall, with the success of the Flanny Sundays – where people share non-crypto activities they’ve been up to throughout the week – we’ve seen there’s both a need and a great desire to create a community that while being crypto-friendly does not necessarily talk about crypto, floor prices or the bear market on a 24/7 basis.
The Discord will be a good step forward to fostering that sense of community going forward, and will also be used in our teased text-based game (more info to come about that in the months ahead).
Flan Content & Partnerships
A much welcome aspect of growing in audience and having a job in a similar lane as I work on in my free time is that you occasionally get invited to work with very interesting people and projects on stuff that you’d have liked to do whether you got paid or not.
Contractual obligations don’t allow me to go into detail about who or what I’m writing for at the moment, but the first few bits of content will be coming out soon. In short,you will see more Flantoshi articles and threads with the benefit of having access to some of the top minds in the Cardano ecosystem.
We are also looking into joining SPO Alliances and groups which will make us eligible for ISPOs, or tokens that we can offer to delegators. For example, we recently applied to the Spacebudz SPO Proposal, and if there is any good news to report on that front, we’ll let you know.
Worth mentioning that I recently got invited to Bullish Dumpling’s Dungeon space to act as a judge for Gero & VyFi. I think it went quite well for my first live appearance.
All in all, I intend on being more open to showing up to interviews, podcasts, spaces, etc and coming a bit out of my shell to explore new avenues.
Resources permitting, this will culminate in opening a YouTube channel where the Flantoshi articles will be used as scripts to produce well-edited educational videos that will be meant for wider consumption, outside of our Twitter bubble. Besides that, we’ll begin to feature interesting, but lesser-known voices of the Cardano community, including up-and-coming artists, developers and creators.
Conclusion
There are a few more bits and bobs that me and the rest of the Flan Clan are working on, but these would be the main things that are worthy of being mentioned at this point in time.
On the backend, I’m also working on some Catalyst proposals to help fund content production and the like, and more information will be available on that shortly. But I do hope to count on your vote when the time comes, as it would help fund operations, especially during this recent bear market where many ghostwriting clients have gone quiet or considerably lessened their output.
Be that as it may, regardless of whether markets are up or down, the FLAN pool builds and tries to be a boon to Cardano. We aim to make the FLAN pool accountable, transparent and worthy of your delegated stake.
Thank you for your continued support, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions about our upcoming plans.
-Flantoshi