Raw Light Express - Issue #2

Shining light on favorite finds and the art of Art to calm the mind! Artists, collectibles, community, occasional deep thoughts. Welcome new subscribers to issue #2!

Yep Instagram along with the entire Facebook ecosystem went down this week because my cinemagraph from 2016 broke the internet reaching nearly 3 million views. Sorry everyone. Knowing this was going to happen I minted it a week ago 😉

Jokes aside… this was the first ever cinemagraph posted by the official @instagram account… at least that’s what they told me when they interviewed me for their blog and IG post 5 years ago. I became an overnight sensation in my own home and this image became my most widely viewed work (actually).

Feel free to help me crash Twitter next and RT this post 👇

Every week I’ll share a few sites I’ve come across or started using that could be of use or vaguely interesting…

gllry.st/ - a nice clean way to display your collected & created NFTs in an easy to organize layout with no fuss. Here’s mine so far (yeah showing off that Ape at the top!): gllry.st/mrjonkane

podcast.banklesshq.com/ - ok this is not new and you’ll have to forgive if I repeat Bankless occasionally (until they sponsor me and I’ll repeat it every time). I get so inspired by the podcasts/interviews they do with total thought leaders in crypto & NFTs.

KSPEC - God mode for NFTs! I’m yet to find out whether this will be open source and how others can integrate this into their own smart contracts or marketplaces but THIS is where NFTs need to go.

I sure as hell can’t cover what everyone is buying but I can provide some insight on what appears to be crossover and consensus from various tight-knit and knowledgeable chat groups I’m in.

FOTO Vault - this is the first Fractional vault I’ve bought into. In a nutshell Fractionalizing is a way to buy into art that most of us couldn’t possible afford to own entirely on your own. When the artworks in the Vault sell at some point all holders of the fractional token receive their profit based on it’s original valuation and actual sale price. FOTO is a great team most of whom I’ve come to know well this year and the growing roster of artists being added is seriously impressive. Vault 2 has just been launched recently consisting of JN Silva, Dave Krugman, Isaac “Drift” Wright and Alejandro Cartagena.

You can get the FOTO token via Uniswap but I’ve found the simplest way is via Fractional.art (links on main site). The best part of FOTO is the Discord community they’re building around this so make sure to join and verify as a holder for benefits and fun stuff like the Vault 1 game we played to collect airdropped cards which combined as a set got you an amazing NFT from one of the artists. Here’s what I won by joining forces because I couldn’t afford to outright buy the cards from others (the strategizing was so much fun)!

Fun is great but does Fractional ownership pay? Yes… I also bought into an iconic photograph by Justin Aversano from his Twin Flames series. My small US$100 piece of that Fractional resulted in about US$700 return when it sold for 505 ETH!

Robotos: I missed these when they first launched and have loved them ever since! Having pooled some funds from what I’m loosely calling the ‘Family DAO’ to buy the Ravi drop listed below but missing out… I decided it was never too late to jump into Robotos and bought a little beauty #4582 ranked 2482 of 10k at 1.38 Eth. Honestly the largest amount I paid for an NFT to date but everywhere I asked Robotos was top of everyones list right now.

AIIV by Ravi Vora - I missed the first drop by Ravi Vora a few weeks ago called ‘Explosions of Color’… well I literally watched it sell out because I didn’t have the .35 eth at the time. Those quickly started selling secondary 10-20 eth! This second series called ‘Singularity’ naturally gained a huge amount of attention and the Discord went nuts (and I mean I literally saw nuts I wish I could unsee!)

Unlike the original drop which simply sold on Opensea this was a contract mint of 1000 works and the first 300 sold in a 1.5 hour pre-sale window for holders of the EOC. When the public mint went live, a few hundred people minted direct from the contract with enough gas that the remaining 700 were literally gone in seconds. I think it could have been a record for fastest sellout ever! The rest of us fumblers arrived on the mint page a few seconds after the link was posted to Discord to find it sold out and our jaws on the floor. The actual floor rose quick on Opensea so I was priced out but I honestly still think it’s a good buy if you can. Ravi is a rising star and these will be the lowest you’ll probably pay for his 1/1’s going forward.

Ravi posted a really good post analysis from his dev team which is well worth a read because this is not uncommon as the technology and structure of popular drops evolves… admitting there is lots to learn from the drop and how it could be better controlled in future but at the end of the day it was an incredible success and he’s a sound guy with genuine integrity so keep an eye on him here.

cryptomutts.io/ - from artist and curator Kenny Schachter. I bought some a few weeks ago having seen it getting popular by some of the team at Institut. The last few days have seen the bots kick into gear on this collection and a floor reaching nearly .3 at time of writing. It’s a collection that has sort of flown under the radar in most chats I’m in but has gained really good organic through what appears to be a fast growing community of people being bridged into NFTs via the traditional art scene and Kenny is both bridging and merging that divide beautifully. He’s not new in NFTs though, Kenny’s previous artworks have been sold out drops on Nifty Gateway not to mention physical artworks auctioned at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Watching this week 👀

Ethereals: 0.0678 ETH Public Minting October 7

MEKAVERSE! With over 150k followers wanting in on this drop it’s being done by raffle. I swear every time I open DM’s on Discord to verify on a new server… I get hackers sending me a message saying “Mekaverse is minting now!” - the first time I clicked to the fake site and hovered over ‘Connect Wallet’ then realized I was standing on the edge of a cliff ABOUT TO JUMP. Had I connected I would have lost a lot.

On that note… to finish.

Get a Trezor to act as another layer of security. Take the view that it’s not a matter of if we will all fall for social engineering hacks… but when! Mitigate your losses and add 2-factor security than means even if your wallet was compromised… they couldn’t transfer anything out of it without approval on your Trezor. Or go further and split your seed phrase on two pieces of paper kept in different countries like Vitalik Buterin and use Gnosis Multi Sig!