_{My own artwork featuring the Ravenking himself}

Short Intro and Mood Setting

This month started with great expectations that I would be spending more time outdoors, but after a short flirt with the sun in the first few days of march, winter has creeped back in to say his final goodbyes it seems.

So in frustration to this turn of events, I found myself in an obsessive craze and frenzy using the time indoors, to wrap my head around deeper with crypto, now that I have returned to hive, this time with the intention not just to use it as a blogger and artist to share my expressions, but to also learn all I can about finances and how to become self-sufficient, independent and build a healthy foundation of wealth to permit me to build a life that is in accordance with my highest vision and integrities.

Anyway after setting up my wallets, investing in a few coins (so far DOT, ADA, ALGO) and also Powering up on Hive and Leo, I began venturing deeper into Leofinance, and began reading through all the different posts I could find that would give me an overview over where the world of crypto was at currently compared to 2-3 years ago when I had left it.

Enter CubDefi

Seeing how everything was buzzing with the upcoming launch of Projectblank and the now launched CubDefi platform, this is where I plunged in head first into having to research what Defi stands for and as I understand it, it basically represents a financial platform with all the financial tools and services that exist in the usual financial sector but run without the need for intermediaries and instead of having large institutions profit from these tools, usually at the expense of our own wealth, the Defi platform basically puts these tools into the hand of the individual. In a world where you are your own bank, being able to allocate your funds and manage them the same way large insitutions do when they guard your money for you is a logical evolution of what crypto seeded with the concept of owning your funds in terms of a private wallet.

Mind you I might have butchered what Defi is, but this is the gist of it that I intuitively could grasp so far. I am open to correction, I have merely tried to give a metaphor of my at the moment understanding.

So after researching all of this I decided to go ahead and take part in CUB. I had received 0.202 Cub which I still have stuck in a binance chain wallet, since in the end I hated binance for having made the process take longer than necessary. I am powering down and selling the last few euros of STEEM left on those accounts, so I used some of that to buw myself some BNB to get started with CUB. I had a 1.50$ worth of it from the STEEM I could pull out. BUT then of course I can not use the funds cause to send them to the metamask wallet I need to have a minimum of 0.01 BNB which I didn't.

No liquidity at hand to continue I stopped, then a few days later I received a few payouts and sold my first 3 NFT's, so I went ahead bought the BNB, filled up my wallet and after trading some LEO for bLEO I managed to stake a lil more than 3 CUB.

I do not understand the mechanics behind the farm but I do wish I had more funds to play with it, since the interest rates are insane to what one expects to ever receive in anything I am familiar with at least.

Although by the time I got into the Platform, The Yearly APR upon daily compounding was merely around 500%, whereas at launch the rates were above 1000%. I will be waiting until beginning next month, then I decide how I allocate my budget further, I have a +-100€ crypto budget, so wondering whether I should just invest that into CUB, or at least 50% of it and use the rest for savings in some other Cryptos.

From CubDefi to Bro-Fi

So as I was browsing around I also stumbled upon Project @Brofi which was another Apr investment farming project, but using Hive-Engine currencies. You can participate simply by delegating either CCC, LEO, CTP, WEED, LOTUS, NEOXAG, PAL, HIVE and maybe 1-2 more that I am missing, and you get a daily return in BRO.

I got my first return today of 0.04$ worth of BRO coins, I delegated a little bit of LEO, LOTUS, NEOXAG and PAL, mind you I do not have much in any of these in total value, but nonetheless you got to start somewhere.

But for the first several weeks being back into the world of crypto I am actually quite pleased in the amount of ground I was able to cover, and to get a basic understanding of the different possibilities that exist in which I can make my wealth passively earn me a little something instead of sitting idly doing nothing.

The Interesting and Strange Realm of NFT

Finally my last wild encounter was with the entire world of NFT's, being an artist who produces art in a wide variety of media but that is so unique and different from the mainstream interests of today, that I never felt like I was displaying or sharing my works in the right communities. Traditional Social Media is a realm that is against each and every of my values and integrities, my wish to infuse things with layers of depth is a sore thumb sticking out in the shallow synthetics of fakebook, I appear more as something dissonant within those ecospheres, whereas here I feel that I encounter a depth in the community, even if I am just reading through the finance section that strikes me tasting of humanity and an extra level of authenticity that seems lacking elsewhere.

So encountering the weird and bizarre world of NFT's, it felt like a mayhem I could resonate to. There is a humour underlying the whole thing that has trickster/mercurial qualities to it. A coyote in a world of Wolves myself, I felt at home sharing my art there. I have gone to the extreme of removing any and all accessibility to my music everywhere, except through their respective NFT's. And while I have received many compliments for my tracks and even had people listen to them on the internet, I kind of felt it was just sitting decorating and drawing in merely viewers for the platforms I was on and not respecting the art for the true value it holds. It was just one other track among a million on sites that advertise themselves through the artists, and profit millions from the jewels we make that people WANT to listen to.

I will place my jewels elsewhere, I never made a penny there with them, here I sold 3 tracks out of 9, shortly after listing my album and while it was not much in terms of nothing to make a living from, I know those 3 are now oddities of the blockchain, musical tokens going on adventure through the different collections and owners that they might pass hands.

I think there is a certain level of hype behind this entire world of NFT, especially on the ETHEREUM chain where people are willing to pay insane gas fees, just throwing money into the fire senselessly, but I also think there is a dimension of it that is authentic. Namely why are only the Big Industries and Critics those who define the Trends and Who Define the Type of Art we should be consuming? I think the NFT world behind just the surface craziness that is happening now, is in a deeper sense also the public's way of redefining for itself what it perceives as art, and artists recognising that here is a space where I can give my art its true value back again and distribute it to a crowd that is open to expand its horizons from what it was programmed to consume automatically. Not needing to pass through the gateways of enslaving big brands and corporations.

It also represents the possibility of a more Fluid and Direct interaction between artist and collector. The unlockable features allow for a wide variety of dynamic functions to be embedded with the NFT-Token. So I think there is a lot of potential within the NFT world to transform our engagement with entertainment/art etc and the relationship between artist and collector.

Making my music accessible only through the tokens for example is a way of adding value to the collection of whomever currently owns it, since people will only be able to access it by visiting the public collection of the owner. Collectors become also Curators in this way.

So I believe I have shared enough from all that I have witness and experienced throughout the past several days while exploring the financial aspect of the crypto world, especially here embedded within the HIVE platform.

My thanks to @leofinance for making the world of finance be accessible to someone who is eager to develop his own understanding so as to become more empowered, sovereign and self-sufficient with the knowledge provided.

My thanks to @nftshowroom for being the visionaries and trailblazers of bringing NFT to hive and welcoming me into the adventure that it is.

Special offer on my NFT's ending Friday Midnight GMT+1, each token sold the buyer gets to choose an account or community to whom I will delegate 50% of the sales revenue for a year, or choose a community token that I should support and stake for a year!

If you are interested in checking out my Portfolio of Art I posted a recent Article featuring my NFT releases in an Exhibition-Style Post.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta