@toadyhawk.eth

Of all the ways we imagined the @betrmint story might end, we never thought it would be… with a legal letter from Jake Paul. But before I get into all that, I want to talk briefly about what @netnose and I have built on @base and @farcaster over the past 18 months. During that time, our little neon experiment grew into something much bigger than we ever expected. You all minted, spun, completed quests, climbed the Karma leaderboard, opened caches, made memes, recruited friends, gave us feedback, broke things, helped us fix them, and (most importantly) you kept showing up and supporting artists onchain. Somewhere along the way, a humble gacha experiment became a close-knit community. I’m incredibly proud of what we built together, and even more grateful for the people who made it what it was. You all spun the neon flywheel over a quarter of a million times (!!), driving more than $350,000 in lifetime volume. We doled out over 5% of the token supply as rewards to stakers, and paid out over $75,000 to our featured artists as well. We especially want to thank @burr.eth , who poured an enormous amount of herself into helping us build this community since day one. So much of the culture, energy and genuine sense of belonging around BETRMINT exists because of the work she put into it. Thank you, Burr. And a heartfelt thank you to @clanker, and Farcaster, and base for all the ecosystem support you provided us as well. Now for the weird part… When we originally came up with the BETR concept and started planning the branding for BETRMINT and BETR Labs, we weren’t aware of any other competing BETR product. But as it turns out, there is another company called Betr Holdings, associated with Jake Paul’s Betr sports-betting app, and last week we received a cease-and-desist letter regarding our name and branding from their lawyer. After considering our available options, we decided that spending our time and resources fighting this legal threat would not be a productive endeavor, so we’ve made the difficult decision to agree to their terms, in order to resolve the matter amicably. This unfortunately means that BETRMINT will have to cease operations and the app will wind down as of October 23. We will also have to retire the BETR name and branding, including all associated apps and sites. Furthermore, this means that we can no longer legally support or promote the BETR token. Today, for our part, we burned every BETR token held by the team and founders, including our personal holdings, in a single onchain transaction (will link it below.) If we find more tokens that we overlooked, we will burn those too. We also took a snapshot of BETR stakers before this announcement today. While we can no longer legally support the token or promise it any future utility, we will not forget the people who have supported us the most. Wherever possible, in whatever we build next, we will find a way to recognize and reward the people who came the furthest on this journey with us. And there will be something next. In fact, we’ve already been hacking for the past few months and something new is almost ready to see the light. More on this soon. In any case, this definitely isn’t how we imagined the BETRMINT story ending. It’s a difficult day… I told Netnose earlier that it feels a bit like we are putting down a family pet :( But we don’t think this chapter was a failure either. We built something from nothing. Thousands of people interacted with it. A real community formed around it. We made mistakes, learned an unbelievable amount, met some amazing people, and came out the other side knowing that there are people out there who genuinely enjoy the kinds of weird experiments we like to build. So to all the Believers, the Belugas, the leaderboard grinders, the artists, the daily minters, and every familiar name we’ve gotten used to seeing: Thank you for taking a chance on us. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for believing… and finally: GLHF. 💛

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