Here comes the second volume of our monthly digest! This time, let’s look back at what we’ve been up to in February 2022.
Our largest deal to date
We’ve successfully closed a deal that put us on the radar of the lending world: A 90-day loan of $126k at 17.9% APR backed by Bored Apes Yacht Club #1614. If you have the platform access key you can view the loan here: https://app.pwn.finance/#/deed/10. Even though blue chip NFTs are not the end goal for us, this is a huge milestone and a proof that we can service this space too. Big big kudos to everyone who worked on this deal - I’m a big fan of the fast execution that the PWN team has demonstrated.
PS: If you don’t have the platform access key, make sure you join the waitlist here: https://pwn.finance/waitlist - I promise, it’s the best thing you’ll do this year.
A new (old?) direction for PWN
To some it was quite obvious, mainly thanks to our branding & general positioning of the project from the very beginning. For the rest - here it is: Blue-Chip-NFTs are not the endgame for us.
Even though our protocol is perfectly suited to service the niche of Blue-Chip-NFTs - you can literally use ANY NFT as collateral on PWN - we’re more interested in the niche of GameFi assets. GameFi is a market segment with many new challenges that we’re very keen on solving. We’ll uncover more about this direction for PWN in our upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned.
PWN Guild in Embersword
One of the GameFi projects that caught our attention is Embersword. It’s a free-to-play fantasy MMORPG. Very similar to Runescape, World of Warcraft, Albion Online (perhaps Diablo a little bit?) and a few others. The game should be released in pre-alpha-mode this quarter.
The PWN team has started an official Embersword guild - and we welcome you to join! We think it’s a great way to connect with our community even outside the boundaries of the PWN project. Check out the #pwn-gaming channel on the PWN Discord for instructions on how to join the guild.
Our very first Twitter spaces
Mark your calendars for March 23 at 4PM UTC (the same time as our community calls) on the PWN Twitter. We’ll introduce the guests of our Twitter spaces over the coming days.
What I’m pondering this month: 11-star user experience
No matter if we admit it or not, we’re heavily influenced by the frameworks we use for our thinking and decision making. For example the official hotel rating goes from 1 to 5 stars.
Yes, there are unofficial 6- and 7-star hotels in the world. But the mentality there is roughly “We’ll build a 5-star hotel, but just make everything out of gold” - that’s not really an “out of the box” mentality.
So if you’re a 5-star hotel, that’s it, you’ve maxed out your potential. You can’t possibly do better. Or can you?
The answer is yes - you can do much better. I believe it was Bryan Chesky of Airbnb who originally used this 11-star framework to figure out how they could take their product experience to the next level. Check out a video clip of Bryan talking about this approach.
There are two key pillars to this framework: Know thy user and forget any limits. The goal is to let your mind run wild and come up with the craziest, most pleasant experience imaginable. When you have your vision, you work backwards from it, build whatever is feasible today and position yourself so that whatever is not feasible today will be made feasible tomorrow.
I’ve drafted an internal document for our team with the vision of the 11-star PWN experience. And we won’t stop before we reach it.
Have a great March, everyone! 🔥
Steve