And so it begins...

Yes, we at Degen Studios have been relatively quiet as of late, with only a small inkling of things trickling through our fingers as we have things to tell. These things spread across a number of sources and social media platforms.

You could see an animation here, a blog post there, an X post, even maybe a TikTok or two across all of our projects, but it's hard to keep it all in focus, right?

We thought so, which is why we welcome you to the Degen Studios Development Blog, or Degen Studios Dev Blog for short, we'll probably just call it "the dev blog" or "our dev blog" when we chat about it though.

To put this in the simplest of terms, we are a group of crypto enthusiasts from around the world who met up during a community take over (CTO) meeting and just ran with it and never stopped running.

That first token we started to represent is called Broge; and yes, we do still support it, and we all still hold some too. This was our first foray into CTO work and we feel proud of what we accomplished. Our artist, a veteran of the animation industry for over 30 years, created a new, cuter-looking rendition of the blue frog mascot. We published a new website, added new socials, investigated the contract thoroughly, added our own funds to liquidity pools, and updated chart platforms such as DexTools, DexScreener, and even CoinGecko.

Next, one of our people had developed a small side project token called V (are Money) this was a simple representation of V, from the film and graphic novel "V for Vendetta," created by Alan Moore. It started gaining traction so we shifted some of our focus over to that. We consider the intent of V to upset the status quo of the crypto industry. Will it? Well, it's a community token as well! The more you help the more likely that will become true!

Finally, it seems like what seems to have become what has gained us the most attention, the highest praise, and built the most bridges and connections is the Degen Point of View ($POV) CTO. This has become a major focus for us as it has shown the most growth potential amongst all of our tokens. Through this takeover we have connected with the Based Hangouts community of Brett 2.0, this has granted us contacts at Dexs and other tool makers allowing us to grow and eventually work our other tokens into utilizing those tools and help us build up our repertoire more.

Degen POV CTO even has a rarity that many meme tokens don't often have, a whitepaper.

As may be pretty clear, the Degen POV Whitepaper actually calls out a number of things that can easily be implemented and used across all of our tokens and tools. However, this is all a lot of work. Community takeover work relies heavily on the generosity and capabilities of volunteers within the associated communities. As such we rely heavily on donations, and patience and trust of our community, we also work extremely hard to gain and to keep that trust, by ensuring we attempt to stick to a #1 guiding principle of transparency wherever and whenever possible. One of the big reasons to have this blog.

So, because of that we're happy to start pointing out the things we've been doing "behind the scenes."

First, let me say that our artist has been rocking it hard with the Degen POV CTO Szn 2 Twitter posts every single day. Seriously, go check out his amazing work. You'll get to meet him later.

As pointed out earlier, we rely on donations quite a bit in our current state, for marketing, and for building out the tools and infrastructure we need. For those not aware; the tools that do exist, such as RPC Nodes, API Endpoints, and other methods of interacting with the chain all cost money. In some cases an exorbitant amount. So, one of the first tools we developed is a utility we call "HolderGrab." What this will do is grab the list of all holders of a token as of a certain block, in the case of Degen POV that's over 930,000 holders as of the block we chose. After receiving this data it then iterates through every address checking against an RPC node to see if the address returns code. If it does return code that is evidence that the address is actually a contract and not necessarily a wallet. This will then eliminate the contract address from the database leaving only wallets, we could also add in other features such as "no activity in x amount of time then dump the wallet.

But why is that useful? Isn't there some sort of "getHolders" endpoint on APIs? Why yes, there is, and that's where that expensive cost comes in, plus this also does not check for the validity of the address. So in any case we'd still be iterating through anyway. The usefulness comes in the fact that we now have a massive database of wallets that may have been active at at least one point in time granting us airdrop targets.

This brings us into the next two tools. One is simply an NFT airdrop utility. This utility will allow community members to mint the NFT of choice to their own wallet, to up to 1,000 friends wallets, or, to help out in the airdropping to those old wallets by selecting a quantity and letting the program run through the list, eliminating the wallets as the airdrops occur.

We're calling the next one Massive Degen. What is it? You may ask, we call it a Market Maker Bot. This is a utility we managed to develop behind the scenes and start to put into practice as a means to earn for our projects. Utilizing this in the right way allows us to push any token into the trending sections of most chart analysis applications within minutes. We don't want to reveal industry secrets (yet) but we've got some even bigger plans to go with this and even increase trust in our abilities and our deployments! This leads us into the things that kind of got "pushed back."

BrogeSwap, some time ago I outlined on Medium the software infrastructure background that would be running big portions of BrogeSwap. That infrastructure plan has actually not changed however, if you go back and read that Degen POV Whitepaper, you can see that we now will be building our own decentralized exchange that we're calling Mental Swap. We will still have BrogeSwap and others, but under the hood, it will be Mental Swap running those operations. There are contract deployment plans and so much more.

Additionally we are actually working on our own hardware infrastructure in order to reduce overall cost and increase the speed and reliability of all our platforms and services. Seriously! It's a ton of work, but we're happy with the progress we've been making.

So, as you can see, we haven't been doing nothing, we've got a ton on our plates! Hardware deployments, software development, contact building, infrastructure development, systems administration, database administration. Hell, even this blog took some work to get moving!

We truly appreciate our community and those who have continued to support us. We will target some sort of post at least once every other week (meaning a minimum of two posts per month.) This post was a broad overview, from here on out there will be more details about the specifics of each item we wish to talk about.