Increase Revenue, Continue Nooting

In order for NFT projects to remain relevant (and not simply successful), there needs to be ongoing utility for holders and members of the community.

In some cases, the community alone is enough; the connections and alpha in some projects is worth the cost of admission. Other projects try to lure users with unsustainable promises of money and revenue, and while this may work great in the beginning, eventually the market changes, the meta shifts, and revenue drops off.

Sustainable Revenue

The Pesky Penguins hypothesis centers around sustainable revenue. As long as Solana exists, we need a revenue stream that doesn't rely on extracting value from users or the ecosystem, but instead comes from providing value.

There's always revenue from staking, and in fact, we have staked Snowball funds to ensure that we'll always have dry powder for burning Penguins, but our revenue here is limited to the size of the Snowball. We need a way to generate enough revenue to run an entire project.

To this end, we've been operating a validator for the past year and a half. The validator helps not only strengthen the Solana network without extracting value from users, and has proven very profitable during times of high network activity.

During bear markets and periods of sparse network activity, however, it has also cost more money to operate than we have earned. There is a solution, however: get enough stake that the validator is always profitable.

Increasing Revenue

We've spent the past couple months working on strategies to increase revenue by having more stake delegated to the validator. These efforts are finally starting to bear fruit:

Run Firedancer

By transitioning our validator client to Firedancer, we became eligible to receive a delegation from the Firedancer Delegation Program. Unfortunately, the program was canceled about a month after we transitioned, but it remains likely that we will receive a 20k SOL delegation for 3 months (until January 2026)

The DoubleZero Network

By connecting our validator to the high-performance DoubleZero network, we have not only noticed a substantial improvement in vote timeliness, we have become eligible for the DoubleZero Delegation Program.

DoubleZero has already begun staking with us, and it's looking likely we'll receive around 10% of our total validator stake from them. In theory, as long as we're below the SFDP's matching threshold of 100k, our balance should creep up regularly. We received 6440 SOL from them in Epoch 857, and anticipate more in the coming weeks!

Shinobi Performance Pool??

There's a pool for the most performant validators on Solana: The Shinobi Performance Pool. Due to some of the cost-cutting decisions we made with regards to the geographical location of our validator, it remains to be seen if we will "make the cut," but one of the other validators I operate has made it into the top 10 validators on Solana and received a 13k delegation from this pool.

As more validators join the DoubleZero network, breaking into this pool will become increasingly difficult, but we've also invested many hours in fine-tuning our hardware and practices. It's possible that, in another 5 epochs or so, we could find ourselves with a nice allocation from Shinobi!

SolBlaze Verified Validators Program

We've been accepted to the SolBlaze Verified Validators Program, and are currently awaiting our stake delegation. We anticipate that this will result in an additional 5k to 7.5k SOL staked at the validator, and all of this qualifies for matching from the SFDP.

Deploying Capital

All this additional revenue should add up to over 100k worth of stake at the validator, which should see us generating enough revenue to not only operate the validator profitably, but hire a marketing team and fund the Snowball.

But the Snowball is not the only thing we plan to fund, oh no.

We've been working for a long time on creating sustainable tokenomics for Pesky Penguins in the same way that we've been working on sustainable revenue, and this will finally come to fruition with the release of the Nest Egg later this year.

That's all the alpha I can afford to share for now, but I do hope you'll come back on our 4th Birthday for some fantastic announcements. Until then, keep nooting, and good luck in all your endeavors!