The Very Internet Person farm season on Baton has concluded! Four Miladys have been successfully emitted and distributed to farmers. Thank you to everyone that participated in this three month long farming experiment to take my Miladys away (๑˃ᴗ˂๑) and thanks to Caviar and Baton for inviting me to try out the platform. Now, I want to write a little review on how things went; the goals, the results, the surprises.
As a more art focused "project", I had never done much with NFTfi. Even though I started out on Fantom, a defi heavy chain, I didn't really delve too deeply into the financialization of NFTs. The focus of my art practice has mainly been on making things that resonate with people on some level – aesthetically, intellectually, memetically, etc. (ie. vibes.) It's why I never really pay much attention to where the floor is or encourage many of the manufactured hype behaviors that have (unfortunately) become the standard fare. I would rather people collect the things I make because they like the art and not because of coercion through outsized promises of utility and returns. And if the art isn't for them, then they don't have to mint/buy it. But I am aware that NFTs are a developing form and a technology that can allow for things to be much more interesting than just being a simple digital art shop that makes you pay with internet money. And, in terms of my broader creative practice, I believe a big part of making art is also experimenting with the medium and form and this is intertwined with my practice as an internet person learning about/experimenting with internet technology.
One of the reasons I deployed Very Internet Person on Ethereum was to play with the wider array of NFTfi tools that were becoming available. I already had a habit of doing things like randomly distributing funds generated from sales and royalties to people who collected my Goool collections. But it was done in a manual, mostly offchain way, just using Disperse to send tokens to addresses I compiled in a spreadsheet. Not very efficient, especially when I have art projects to do.
The Caviar VIP pool had been going for a while when Tamagoyaki from Caviar asked me if I wanted to try out a new NFT yield farming platform called Baton that was being built on top of Caviar and introduced me to the founder, Sapijiju. It sounded very interesting to me and I started thinking about what I could do with it.
As I thought about how the space has evolved and where it was at, I had been wanting to move some more VIP trade activity away from the standard order book marketplaces to the Caviar pool. This would enable people to do things like directly swap for their desired VIPs without having to go through sell/buy and also earn rewards from the trading activity (stakers receive the trading fees whereas the fees on things like OpenSea go to the marketplace platform.) I like how this system benefits the people who enjoy being a part of the project whereas the traditional marketplaces can sometimes feel like a PVP funnel to get out of projects at the expense of someone else. The typical order book marketplaces make more sense for specific pieces that one might want to sell far above floor price. Given the current state of the space, it feels like a good time to try different models. But with Caviar being relatively newer on the scene itself, many people had not used it before and so I thought doing a Baton farm would be a good way to incentivize checking it out. Like I said, I also wanted to experiment.
Most defi farms I've seen usually emit tokens of equal or lesser value than the deposit tokens. For some reason, I thought maybe the VIP farm should emit tokens that are much higher value than the VIPs. There is a recommendation in the Milady world that derivatives use a portion of mint proceeds to sweep and stake Milady assets (a sort of anti-grifter virtue check – though questionable in its effectiveness as such.) I wasn’t expecting to make much on the VIP mint but VIP was ~80% free minted so that meant I still wound up with some funds and I was thinking about the best way to use it. To be honest, I don't consider VIP a full-on Milady derivative (the influence is there but maybe it’s closer to a Cigawrette or something else Milady adjacent, having a different audience) so I thought I would do things a little differently. I'd pick up some Miladys and give them back to the people in VIP instead of pocketing them for myself. I figured the Milady price would remain relatively stable over the three months to sustain a good yield for farmers. It actually outperformed and did better than I expected.
I imagine some crypto CFOs probably shaking their heads at this right now. Like, why would I give away over $25,000 in assets to people who mostly minted their depositing assets for free and the collection is also royalty free?? I don't know, I spend most of my day obsessing over tiny color squares on a screen so there is probably something wrong with me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just having fun on the internet.
Anyways, a number of things happened because of the farm. The majority (~75%-80%) of listed VIPs moved to Caviar so that was a success. Activity in both the Caviar and NFTX pools increased, generating rewards for stakers in each. Bids increased on Blur/OS as people in the know were picking up VIPs to farm with while people who were unaware were selling into the low bids giving farmers good deals. Overall, this created a much more liquid state for the VIP over the three months where people could drop in and out as they pleased and maybe accelerated the transfer of VIPs out of temporary post-mint homes into more permanent ones.
There were some minor pain points. The hardest part was getting the word out about it since signal on Twitter had been severely degrading at the same time (thanks, Elon.) Some people were only hearing about the farm halfway through the three months and missed a big chunk of emissions. There was also a bit of learning curve because many people were not used to this kind of thing after so many years of NFT trading being stuck in the same pattern. There were arbitrage opportunities that were not taken where people were selling their VIPs on Blur/OS for much lower than they could have received from selling into the liquidity pools. People have habits and discovery was hindered by impaired signal.
Through all this, I learned quite a bit more about order books, AMMs, and yield farming and I think it was a worthwhile thing to do – if only to add a fun activity for VIP during this quiet time in the space. And I hope the Milady rewards made a lot of VIP people happy too!
I suppose the next part of the experiment is to see what happens to the collection post-farm. There are many ways things could go. Will things stay liquid? Will things go to zero? I think there will be some increased activity on Caviar as some people unwind their positions – this will create rewards for the people who stay in the pool. Will the listings move back over to Blur/OS or stay on Caviar? OpenSea Pro is working on Caviar integration so that will help with discovery and give more visibility to the pool on a more mainstream marketplace (you can actually see Caviar pieces on OSpro already but it doesn't really function properly because the price doesn't curve as you add them to the cart.) Will I do another farm? Maybe. VIP was still a pretty young project when the farm was deployed. It would be interesting to try it again further down the road when the VIPs have settled more and maybe at a different price point to see how it plays out differently. I think Baton would be interesting to use as a reward for hitting certain milestones. I have ideas for alternate setups and conditions but, as I mentioned above, I don't like to promise things as a way to make people buy art they may not enjoy on a real level. So please don't hold me to it, maybe a totally different experiment will pop up. Things in this space change rapidly, even if we are deep in the "bear." I do weird spontaneous things all the time. That's part of the fun.
For now, I'll keep dreaming up and making new things for VIP while more organic forces shuffle the VIP collection a bit. Now that the farm is done, I can attend to some other VIP things that have been simmering for a while. TTYL ILYSM!
Bonus: I took a snapshot of everyone who came through the farm this summer and you can free claim an edition of this VIP farmer animation on Zora to commemorate your time on the farm if you’d like! 🤍