June 17, 2022

🥛 The craziest human experiment you’ve never heard of

https://delta.onelink.me/a1Ot/milkroad

GM. This is the Milk Road. And when it comes to crypto, we give you the scoop like a high schooler working at Cold Stone. And yes – we put rainbow sprinkles on top.

It’s been a week.

So, today we’re taking the edge off and giving you some fun stuff:

  • 🤑 Milk Money Wrap Up

  • 🤯 The man who split himself into 100k shares

  • 💰 Funding Friday

  • Trivia of the Day

Estimated read time: 2 minutes & 46 seconds

MILK MONEY WRAP-UP

Last month we launched an experiment: give people 1 ETH to build whatever they wanted. No strings attached.

There was only 1 rule: If you were selected, you’d have to launch your project publicly in 1 month or less. Here’s how it went down:

  • 1,000+ people applied

  • Calm and Thirdweb matched our donations (go check em out!)

  • We accepted just ~1% of applicants (Harvard who?)

Now that the 1 month is up, here are 3 of our favorite projects:

Earn Arcade: A play-to-earn version of Wordle.

Guess the 5-letter word, and win crypto. The faster you solve it, the more you get! It’s so easy I already got my grandma signed up.

This will be a daily Milk Road activity. Great for the mind and the wallet.

Formie: The antidote to Etherscan minting

Ever minted an NFT directly from Etherscan? You probably lost money and a little self-esteem in the process….

Formie allows you to turn a smart contract into a user-friendly interface that anyone can understand.

Airdropr: The Mailchimp for web3. Looking for an easy way to airdrop tokens and NFTs to your fans & customers? Airdropr is perfect for you. All with no code.

Well, this was a pretty cool experiment and one we’ll wanna try again soon. If you want to check out the rest of the projects, check them out here!

Until then go be Bob the Builder, not Mr. Market.

THE MAN THAT SPLIT HIMSELF INTO 100K SHARES

So, there’s a guy named Patrick Campbell.

He just sold his company for over $200M (like a month ago) and was looking to spend some of that bread.

Most would look to buy the finer things in life. Lamborghinis, Rolex watches, and boats. Others would invest their money in things like real estate, bonds, and crypto.

But not Patrick. Instead, he decided to park some of his money into….*drumroll please*……

The first publicly traded human being.

What does that even mean? Well, back in 2008 this other guy named Mike Merrill was having a little "identity crisis". He was bored with his job at a software company, he didn't know what decisions to make next, etc.

So he decided to do what any person would – he split himself up into 100k shares, sold them for $1 each, and would let his shareholders make the decisions for him. He calls it Community Through Capitalism.

We call it Community Through Craziness…But what’s crazier is at the peak, Mike's shares were going for ~$20. 🤯

His value has gone down since then, but his shares are still going for ~$6.50.

And now Patrick thinks it’s time to invest. He thinks Mike is a diamond hidden in the rough and is betting this could be his next big win.

He’s so convinced that he just did a “hostile takeover” where he calculated how many shares he’d need to be able to vote any proposal in his favor.

Patrick now pretty much “owns” Mike, in a sense. He could make Mike do some pretty crazy stuff.

And that’s exactly what Patrick plans to do. We aren’t talking "go rob a bank" type stuff, but he thinks that pushing Mike out of his comfort zone will help get more eyes on him. Which will increase his value.

Here are some things that have been voted out in the past and how the votes went.

  • Get a vasectomy? No (talk about a ballsy one)

  • Buy a media company? Yes

  • Switch to an Android phone? No

  • Use psychedelics? Yes

  • Subscribe to the Milk Road? Hell Yes

The last proposal was whether he should take a new contracting gig with an NFT project called Fingerholers.

It was approved with 66% of the votes in favor of it.

Welcome to Web3, Mike.

The Milk Road’s Take: This is insane and amazing at the same time. There are 10,000 questions going through my head…

What if they do vote for him to do something like rob a bank? Does he have to do it? If he gets caught is he just gonna pull the "Patrick made me do it" card?

THE WEEKLY RECAP

It was an eventful week, to say the least. But you know we got you covered! Check out what you missed below:

Monday: WOW! The crypto crash explained

Tuesday: The three big things we’re watching right now

Wednesday: The next phase of the crypto crash

Thursday: Are you laughing or screaming?

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FUNDING FRIDAY

Each Friday, we give you a rundown of Web3 companies that got funded. This week we saw ~$350M get invested into companies. Here’s who got the money:

NFTPort got $26M to build infrastructure for easier NFT transactions. They’re trying to be the Stripe for NFTs.

TripleA got $4M to build a payment platform that lets businesses easily accept crypto.

Endaoment got $6.7M to develop the first on-chain 501(c)(3) community foundation. Crypto meets Philanthropy.

Tellie got $10M to let creators build their own Web3 websites. They'll be able to offer NFTs and tokens with tiered access.

Molecule got $13M to build a marketplace where you can invest in biopharma research projects as a DAO.

Click here to grab the Milk Road database of every company that got funding!

TRIVIA OF THE DAY

There's only one person who gets featured on the Milk Road every single day. The Godfather of Ethereum – Vitalik Buterin.

It's only fitting our first trivia is about our lanky king.

So….what month is Vitalik's birthday in?

Reply to this email with your answer (don't google it!) and we'll pick 5 people who get it right to win some ETH!


Have a great weekend, see ya next week!

Shaan aka “Elon’s chocolate milk” & Ben "2% Milk" Levy

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