Welcome to Hello from Marv Newsletter #7

It's been a little quiet here, apologies. The last 2 weeks were monstrously busy, not at all aided by the inspiration to redesign my newsletter & website to coincide with Consensus. Welcome to the 7th edition of Hello from Marv, complete with new branding and hopefully a much more unified experience.

New Website!

I spent the last couple weeks engaging in what the kids these days call "vibe coding." This is when an individual with limited coding capabilities (me) embraces AI tools to make something much better than logic dictates they should be capable of.

I used v0.dev to build, my screenshot capabilities to gather inspiration, and Claude to help formulate the most effective prompts. There was a ton of back & forth, and the magical moments of creation were interspersed with bouts of fury familiar only to those who work with AI tools. Was it less time consuming than using a drag&drop website builder? That's an emphatic no from me dawg. 

This experiment was a little more short-lived than I'd like. Websites are meant to last a little bit of time at least, mine lasted a month and change. After weeks of prompting and re-prompting, I had no choice but to throw in the towel and went back to the drawing board. Long story short, v0 downed tools and wasn't making changes correctly any more. 

My whole intention was to come up with a website that pops, and all I was getting was something that looked pretty generic. So I decided to learn Framer. Monstrously difficult, 2/10 would not recommend. I might have even booked a consultation with a very pleasant freelancer named Umar to guide me through the basics. But I think it looks a lot closer to what I'm going for. Screenshot below, but totally visit the site because those animations are sliiiiick. 

Celebrating 10 Years of Ethereum

I'm excited to announce a new project I'll be working on alongside Chinmay Patel and Jean Fernandes. Over the next 10 weeks, we'll be hosting spaces every weekday at 1pm, and our mission is to cover EVERYTHING being put in place on Ethereum. From infra to memecoins to governance to anything you can think of. We've got some incredible guests who have literally shaped Ethereum's global footprint, and we want you to hear directly from them. This will be our reliable, regular programming for the foreseeable future, you don't want to miss it! Make sure you're following us on X to be notified, and all of our uploads will eventually make it to Youtube.

We've now done 2 episodes, touching on different parts of the ETH ecosystem. We started off the 10 Years of ETH broadcasts with a bang, featuring Jason Chaskin and Josh Stark of the Ethereum foundation. The role of foundations in crypto are changing, and our 2 guests are at the forefront of many big decisions. It's an essential listen.

And episode 2 was one for the online creators, with Humpty Calderon and Adrienne Schulman, the masterminds behind the CryptoSapiens newsletter and GM Farcaster podcast respectively. Both are champions for the new creator economy we are putting in place. One episode for the left brains, another for the right. Catch both their episodes below.

We've also got a Linktree to keep all our socials and uploads in a single place. 

Non-Consensus Events

The past few weeks have been absolutely electric for Toronto's crypto scene, with several major events bringing together our vibrant community:

Solana Startup Village - I kicked off my activities by spending a whole lot of time at Queen's Quay with the Solana Community. I was invited to participate in their 2-week startup village, where they rented out a fully-equipped co-working space and meeting hub. Before coming into this, I had ample knowledge about how well Solana & Superteam co-ordinate their building and messaging. After my time here, that respect increased tenfold. SuperSimon and Fibonnaci, kudos for running such an uplifting melting pot of activities.

Crypto is reaching a stage where the ability for one person or tiny teams to truly move the needle is starting to diminish. Especially on the technical sides. To some networks (cough Cardano) this seems to be an impasse. Solana understands the power of narrative and community better than most. And they deployed this knowledge toward a whole week of programming to better enable their community to use the tools they have put in place.

I met so many interesting builders at varying parts of their journeys. Julien and Yuki from DAIKO saw their idea come to life that week, and watching it develop was really fulfilling. This video editing backlog is really something but I should shout out the SolSociety lads from Montreal. Semo & Home, I'm working on it 😅 And Tony from Metaplex, the amount of knowledge you were spitting every time we hung out really was a sight to behold. I've got so much praise for what the community is putting together, can't wait to drop into the next Solana Vibestation. Again, this warrants a longer set of thoughts and I'll be crafting that soon!

Web3TO was a fantastic opportunity to share the stage with GloDollar's Lana Dingwall, where we dove deep into Public Goods Funding. We covered the big picture of the sector together, and I got to talk about Breadchain - especially how we're utilising crypto's trustlessness to deploy a greater share of money for good than ever before. It's always energising to discuss how our technology can create real-world impact.

Crypto Mondays are among the longest-running set of global events, and Bitcoin Bay helped make it happen in Toronto this year at Grizzly Bar. It was early in the week, and a great chance to meet many people who flew into Toronto for the festive period.

I'm grateful for the friends and community I've been able to spend time with here, and Consensus brought a carnival atmosphere. If you thought the main event was noteworthy, the side events are where we were able to build on the ideas being communicated on stage. Lodge on Queen, the Polkadot house for the duration of the festivities, served as a bit of a home base. Torontonian community builders Natti, Jay, and Michael were as usual the life of the party, and meeting the extended team behind Polkadot's incredible on-site activations was fantastic. Shout out to WebZero, represented on the ground by Zoe, Sacha and their teams. This also warrants a much more real estate than a newsletter can provide, so watch this space for a more detailed deep dive.

We also hosted a GreenPill event at the Polkadot house, where we discussed a lot of refi-themed topics, and I got to talk about Breadchain here too. It was a diverse group of voices, some of whom I'm driven to have on the podcast.

What I enjoyed much more was seeing plenty of folks in crypto media and beyond whose work I really admire. I got to put faces to Twitter presences - among these were Lily Brodi (top Cardano content creator), Jay from the Milk Road Podcast, and Connor Gaydos from Enron. There's such an amazing story regarding Enron and Gaydos - I have to make a detailed explainer and throw in some of my footage. I fanboy over very few people, and Connor is most definitely up there. Also included a photo of the Delorean that we had there. YES! The one from Back To The Future!

The event itself was great, despite the weather being grey and rainy. And boy, was it cold. But Ryan, Wilder and Paul made it a true celebration, the pizza and drinks just kept coming. Here are some photos of the event. There happened to be another pizza party happening underneath the Gardner Expressway so hope the 2 events can join forces for next year. The shirts this year were great, look out for a familiar podcast logo among the sponsors 👀 And speaking of sponsors, friends of the podcast Sacred Protocol were headline sponsors for Pizza Day. The photo is one from earlier in the day, we had so many people showing up! Unabashed success.

And that's the round-up for this edition!

Thanks so much for reading. If you're here on the website, please subscribe! Fill out your email in that big, beautiful bar below. I'd love to have you as part of the community. Promise not to spam you 😊

Take care, and see you on the next one!

Cheers, Marv