Writing this out because there’s no concise “insta-friendly” way to convey what Frank and the DustLabs team is doing

TLDR: We will look back on this moment as being one of the largest catalysts and most innovative pivots in all of web3.

Back in November I wrote this article about a few panels I listened to and my experience at Wormhole’s Hackathon in Chicago. While it didn’t stop my natural feeling of “ick” surrounding Solana in general, it did do a great job of converting me from an ETH-Maxi to an “Omni-chainist” (a term created for this write up). I read through the wormhole whitepaper objectively and it seemed very sound. I wondered what would be the project, dApp, or trend that would spawn adoption and use of their infrastructure, but that wonder would be overshadowed a few weeks after the hackathon when FTX collapsed

DeGods started off on Solana, but after the FTX implosion and its subsequent effects on the Solana community, it was rumored that DeGods would be looking to move the brand to other chains.

I remember seeing tweets of DeGods potentially moving to polygon around December 2022. Casual cruising of crypto twitter showed a lot of people mocking them, calling them grifters for wanting a payout to move off chain (or to stay with Solana). I’ve always found it perplexing how people can complain that there aren’t enough “benefits to holders” these days in pfp communities and then subsequently shame a project for looking for the best place to acquire more funding but I digress.

I would not hear about DeGods again until videos surfaced of Frank in ArtBasel at some party, I rolled my eyes and ignored the project. I’d then hear about Frank again after my buddy Matt (owner of ImNotArt) in Chicago shared some thoughts with me and some other friends about some interesting points he heard from Frank at EthDenver again… just kind of rolled my eyes and ignored it. I never outwardly hated on the project, I was just burnt out on the usual hype > fomo > disappearance act of projects (GoblinTown anyone?) and couldn’t be bothered but the project finally caught my eye when they charged head first into Bitcoin Ordinals.

I’ve worked in cybersecurity for over a decade, and consider myself highly technical so I was uniquely impressed with their decision to make an ordinal collection because it is the furthest thing from smooth or intuitive but I ultimately didn’t bother to look into the project further UNTIL the wormhole announcement.

What many don’t realize is that there won’t be 9,500 DeGods on eth, 9,500 on solana, and 9,500 on polygon but rather there will be 9,500 available across all chains wormhole supports with their “Burn and Mint Standard”.

• You send an NFT to Wormhole where it is effectively burned (but is really just locked into a contract.)
• Wormhole then mints that NFT and all of its metadata onto the desired destination chain.

The announcement stated that the bridge will be hosted directly on the Y00ts website. This was likely a strategic move that’ll involve a dedicated burn/mint experience exclusively for polygon but we can see from Wormhole’s “Portalbridge” that they support a lot of other chains.

While this event will likely be exclusively for polygon, this does open up a world of possibilities to all projects that are aware of the capability. I’m also curious about the ordinals and will be following their integration into the DeGods ecosystem closely, but make no mistake, this offering from Wormhole is a very big deal.