Recap: $LINK OPEN MIC 🎤 Space

Friday, I hosted a 6+ hour space on X called $LINK OPEN MIC 🎤, aiming to unite those passionate about Chainlink (CL) in what's been a remarkable quarter for the project. This post serves as a summary for those who missed out, particularly given that the session wasn't recorded and there have been requests for a recap.

Chainlink has been on an international roadshow to highlight the debut of the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), celebrate the ongoing successful partnerships with SWIFT, DTCC, and ANZ Bank, and underscore to the world's traditional financial institutions that global finance will inevitably run on cryptographically secure blockchain technology.

EthCC 6 → Token2049 → Korea Blockchain Week 2023 → Sibos 2023

All roads to lead to SmartCon 2023 in Barcelona - OK:VAMOS!

With all of the amazing news and events happening in the Chainlink Ecosystem, I knew I wasn’t the only one in the Chainlink Community watching along online that actually wanted to talk about it. So, I spun up the space to find out and talk shop with some internet friends.

What resulted was an action-packed six hours of discussion ranging from alpha, culture, current events, finance, the future, individual experiences and journeys, memes, technology, and more — Chainlink being the underlying theme of the call.

Below I try to briefly capture what went down during Friday’s $LINK OPEN MIC 🎤 space. It’s not perfect, nor all encompassing; I’ll try my best to summarize. I’ll be touching on this at a high level, so don’t expect a dive into technical details here.

OK;LG

The Beginning

I turn on the space and share it directly with the various Link Marine community group chats I’m a part of to get the ball rolling, one of which being the Link Toads (LTOADs) NFT community.

LTOADs is a Chainlink community DAO based around the positive side of Link Marine culture and are on a mission to work with ChainlinkBuild projects to share what they’re building with the masses while testing and providing early feedback on their products.

Frequently, LTOADs hold community spaces where Chainlink is discussed, so some friends like @Letz_Go0 (Let’s Go), @JDKirkendoll (Solver), @ARiHBARi (Ari), @KenHuys (Panda), @thefetztizzle (Fetz), and @thealexturley (Alex), Chainlink Community advocate and partner of ours at MDMA, all stopped by to start up a conversation.

Largely, everyone shared a similar excitement for all of the recent news pouring onto the timeline related to Chainlink. There was some discussion of how the sentiment tide has begun to shift towards positivity for $LINK, strengthened by the team’s hard work and the growing strength of the ecosystem.

Other friends came through too, like @_an0n777, who shared a similar positive outlook on $LINK and had lots to say about the great content the Chainlink team has been disseminating while at Sibos, like how Sergey talked about institutions leading the way when it comes to mass adoption of CCIP, and how the public will be seamlessly integrated beind the scenes.

rootslashbin

rootslashbin (root) entered the space relatively early. I love speaking with root because of his technical competency and experience building distributed systems and with cybersecurity. root doesn’t mess around when it comes to speaking his mind too (strong opinions loosely held), so for me, the fact that root holds Chainlink to a high standard means something.

root helped with technical explanations during the convo. Like how Chainlink is architected and the various services that make up CL’s product offering. We talked about how CCIP works, how decentralized Chainlink is, Chainlink’s Total Addressable Market, and different risks to be mindful of that could affect Chainlink’s ultimate success, like the risk of being labeled a “security” by the SEC.

By this time, there were some recurring talking points worth noting:

• Chainlink’s team is world class and never shills their token price

• their building has been relentless and secure

• their institutional partnerships have been successful

• their marketing, communications and PR have been crisp and clean

• their roadshow has successfully made a clear statement to TradFi

• and that the Chainlink Community is stronger and more active than ever

Literally every aspect of Chainlink has been demonstrably improving in front of all of our eyes - we all see it.

Oh yea, root also ate breakfast 🤣

Chainlink Community Advocates

The room started to grow and we started to see some other Chainlink Community Advocates stroll in like @MarquartCapital (David) and @backedbyblocks (Evan) who were both kind enough to come up as speakers and say hello to the community. Both shared a bit about their background and how they got into Chainlink. In addition we had Alex, as mentioned above, so I think we had a total of three Advocate speak in total! (I hope I didn’t miss anyone)

Fishy Catfish

And then we got @CatfishFishy (Fishy) to join!

Fishy is an OG LINK Marine from the 2017 ICO days, often found on the timeline decimating those seeking to FUD or spread misinformation about Chainlink. Fishy was summoned to answer a very specific question someone had regarding a certain Chainlink multi-sig. After he gave a sufficient answer to move forward, we were able to dig into his journey through crypto so far.

That journey started with poker and Bitcoin. Fishy explained that online poker payments were a constant issue for players in the US due to regulations, and that $BTC was used as an alternative method to deposit and withdraw money from online poker websites at the time. He immediately saw the value of Bitcoin and down the rabbit hole he went!

Fishy found himself mining $BTC and $LTC in the early days, taking profits on Poloniex during the golden days of the platform. He then switched to focus on only mining Potcoin for about 7-8 months straight after finding the use-case to be cool. He held his Potcoin for 4 years waiting for prices to recover (and they did), but sold a week before Dennis Rodman wore Potcoin gear on a trip to North Korea when price really pumped.

Fishy sold his Potcoin and other mined / accumulated coins for $ETH in early 2017 while experiencing the ICO craze start to play out with coins like $0X which he was able to take part in. A whole new ecosystem was emerging on Ethereum and that was apparent to Fishy. Good poker players are risk-tolerant and can stomach the volatility crypto markets bring; early moves like this demonstrate that.

A friend of Fishy’s pointed him to /biz/, a somewhat business-related message board on 4chan, in 2017. Anons were posting alpha and breadcrumbs and memes related to Chainlink there. He first learned about Chainlink around Sibos 2017 when Chainlink’s first proof of concept with SWIFT was announced.

This led Fishy to do his own due diligence on Chainlink, which resulted in uncovering Chainlink CoFounder Sergey Nazarov’s Quora account. Fishy was impressed with Sergey’s public Quora responses to questions from over 9 years ago today. Looking back at young Sergey, Fishy saw an individual taking the time to help other people online through well written responses that reflected the type of helpful and intelligent person Sergey is.

A big thing that stood out to Fishy was that, when asked “What are some ways to tell that a startup is doomed to fail?”, Sergey’s top reason was that “founders want to make "easy money". Awesome, here’s a CoFounder that isn’t out to make a quick buck! Having learned about the tech, and the character of the project CoFounder, Fishy says that at that point it was impossible for him not to pour all of his money into $LINK.

We all know and love the Fishy we get to experience on the timeline every day. He’s been at it for years and his voracity for knowledge has only strengthened over time.

Fishy stuck around Q&A before heading off to do some parent duties. He came back and in total I’d estimate he was in the space for over half of the total time. Topics covered ranged from Chainlink’s growth, tech, and future trajectory.

Super grateful to have been able to host Fishy on what was his first space ever!

The man’s a cornucopia of knowledge and it was great to finally hear from him.

FUDers

There were a few accounts that found the need to request to speak and shout into the mic about how other projects were going to the moon, even cutting off Fishy at one point and talking over everyone. In this moment I learned how easy it is to mute speakers and remove them from the stage on X.

The party continues!

ChainkLinkGod

@ChainLinkGod (CLG) also stopped by and boy was that also a pleasure!

ChainLinkGod joined the discussion when a speaker was questioning Chainlink’s transparency and tokenomics. The speaker was respectful so I let them make their point, as it’s good to hear opposing views to test your thesis and I’m all for a good debate. After various exchanges with Fishy, it was clear the individual was continuing to repeat the same responses, so we moved on to allow CLG to share his thoughts on the topics.

On transparency and tokenomics, CLG said that he believes Chainlink has been moving more and more towards being transparent and, compared to the rest of the projects in the space, maintains a high level of transparency about what’s being built. People want all of the answers and want to look behind the curtain. Since that’s ultimately never 100% going to be the case, they’ll always have something to poke.

I asked ChainLinkGod if he thinks Chainlink will ever move to create an official dashboard, as an example of moving more and more toward transparency, to present a single source of truth for metrics like revenue from its various sources and CLG said he does see that as something that should happen. Dashboards do exist, he mentioned, but they’re in different places and have different sets of information.

ChainLinkGod then went on to talk a bit about his background and journey through crypto. He studied computer science while in college, then ultimately dropped out to pursue crypto full-time. CLG was very interested in blockchains as data structures. Bitcoin attracted his attention when he learned that people were making money mining it by simply running software on their computers. This led him down the rabbit hole.

CLG remembers looking at CoinMarketCap and noticing that most of the tokens that started to appear were being built on Ethereum, so naturally he jumped down the Ethereum rabbit hole. Smart contracts would allow for so much more, he thought. He then learned about Oracle networks and how Chainlink was looking to bring off-chain data on-chain, and he thought this was an even bigger opportunity.

Along the way, ChainLinkGod saw the large information asymmetry playing out online. Information was siloed and you had to be highly technical to understand it. The answers ChainLinkGod would seek for himself at the time was then turned into content and shared with others. (Are you starting to notice a recurring theme in the types of individuals that are attracted to this project?)

CLG is very talented at breaking down complex information and repackaging it so the average people can understand - we all learn so much from him regularly. Twitter’s character limit kind of forces you to do that anyway, he said. He then moved on to writing threads and experimenting with other forms of content. Although we didn’t hear about specifics, this led him to start working with Chainlink as a Community Ambassador, writing blog posts on Chainlink’s website, and starting the CLG Podcast.

ChainLinkGod went on to answer questions from Chainlink Community members while he was able to stay and chat.

Super stoked to be able to talk to be able to host CLG for a bit!

ChainLinkBull

Thankful to also be able to host @ChainLinkBull, OG LINK Marine and Co-Founder of Postmint, a platform that allows projects to leverage a decentralized army of content creators.

I had the privilege of meeting ChainLinkBull at NFTNYC earlier this year and we’ve been homies since. I’ve also been the beneficiary of some nice rewards from his platform 🤠 

CLB commented on Chainlink’s BUILD and SCALE program, as well as how Chainlink has defined the narrative of the next cycle and how sentiment is shifting overwhelmingly positive. He’s stoked to be heading to SmartCon 2023 and knows it’s going to be a vibe.

Mr. Blu

ROTP space legend @__MrBlu__ (Mr. Blu) joined towards the ¾-mark. For those that don’t know Mr. Blu, I’ll let you dive into his rabbit hole for yourselves but what I will say is he’s an legend when it comes to hosting avant-garde and comedic X spaces. Ask him about his sleepover marathon space.

Mr. Blu had a bunch of nice words to say about Chainlink and the Chainlink Community. LINK Marines are some of the hardest in the crypto-game. Blu also had a lot of nice things to say about the LINK Open Mic 🎤 space and encouraged they occurred on a regular basis. LINK Marines deserve it.

We didn’t get into Blu’s background or how he got into Chainlink, so more to talk about next time! Blu also called me a good host, which was very kind and got me a little bricc’d up ngl 😅

Dr. SamuelAlpha

@SamuelAlpha77 (Sam) also stepped up to speak, after telling me I had been “too nice” to Mr. Blue 😂

Sam, Crypto X’s resident Doctor, helped CoHost the end of the show when my energy and focus was winding down. Really appreciated that.

Another reason I wanted to include Sam in this write-up is because I want to thank him for being one of the key individuals on my own personal Chainlink journey. Sam invited me to some really dope OG LINK Marine chats that resulted in many great friendships, experiences, and opportunities.

Cheers mate! 🍻

The End

After six hours of engaging conversation, the space felt right to come to an end as dinner time approached in the States and an abstract question about eating bugs made me realize I needed to eat something myself.

Fishy shared some kind words about Chainlink’s community and headed off to dinner to lead the way. He’s a pretty humble dude and it’s awesome he stuck around for all the time he did.

I found myself so hangry in those final moments that I removed Sam as CoHost so I could mute him to get off the abstract topics and wind-down the space 😂

Final goodbyes were said and I might’ve said a little closing piece about why I chose to start the space initially and the positive energy we’ve all been feeling about Chainlink.

The $LINK OPEN MIC 🎤 space was a lot of fun. I had a great time hosting and steering the conversation, despite being sick. I appreciate all of the kind words that people shared during and after the space; response was overwhelmingly positive.

It’s awesome that the Chainlink Community is made up of so many amazing individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives to bring to the table.

I plan on running spaces like this in the future and hope to hear from more people in the Chainlink Community, the goal being to provide a casual space for respectful discussion about all things Chainlink - something the community truly deserves.

Here’s some of the feedback that was shared about the space.