Caracas Chronicles

UPDATE: check out the collection on opensea.

So it took us a couple of weeks to get our ducks in a row, but here we are. We’re officially dropping the CC NFT bills on October 28th at 2:00 p.m. EST. We’re having a Twitter Space “drop party” with J.N Silva (NFT master), Alejandro Machado (our own cryptocurrency guru), and Jesús “Chubeto” Bolivar (who’s been key to bringing about the project). Also, we opened a discord channel for anyone interested to join in and have access to the team and to the early bird collection.

In this post, we’re going to explain what we’ve been up to these days, and you’ll get more details on the tokens themselves. Also, we’ll add a little more context regarding the background of the bills, because people have asked. We’ve also updated the NFT Chronicles landing page with this information—on that page you’ll find the whole story if you’re not up to speed. Here’s the TL;DR:

On the occasion of Venezuela’s third currency redenomination of the century, Caracas Chronicles is making an NFT drop of its own bills—originally designed and released for a 2015 campaign to shed light on the country’s insane monetary policy. The campaign went viral and confused many Venezuelan bigwigs back then. It was hilarious. This is the beginning of a project to integrate blockchain solutions to design a sustainable model to fund independent journalism in Venezuela (starting with Caracas Chronicles, and our sister site, Cinco8).

So, here it goes:

We will be dropping 99 tokens total, 33 of each bill. However, we worked with our own Sofía Jaimes (the name behind Avila Composición) to make each token unique. She helped us develop a pattern of 33 colors. So we’ll have 33 color series of three tokens (Bs. 500, Bs. 1,000, and Bs. 2,000). This is a grid view of the whole collection:

Each token includes both sides of the relevant bill displayed vertically, with a color background, and the CC logo. The description of the tokens will include a short bio of the featured character and information on the locations that appear on the back of the bills.

Also, each token includes a one-year subscription to our Political Risk Report for the first owner. The PRR is our flagship product and it’s priced at $420 per year.

The Fun Stuff

People had been asking about the time when our bills went viral. I made a little thread about it on Twitter, but later we thought it would be a good idea to have it here for the record.

We never intended for the bills to go viral, it was a project we had been working on for months with our audience. Daniel Cadena Jordan can attest to this as he was in charge of bringing it about, as well as Emiliana Duarte who was the managing editor at the time.

People voted, the design was commissioned, and this was the result.

Not everybody was happy with the figures selected, but we simply let democracy run its course.

And then… politicians started stepping on it.

And Twitter journalists…

And reddit… (at least they called it a rumor):

Chavista media went for the scoop, both La Iguana and Últimas Noticias:

Some folks went as far as citing us as the source, but clearly they had been skipping their Open English classes. Kudos to La Patilla for covering it correctly (on their second attempt). It was an incredibly low point for Twitter journalism.

We had a laugh, of course. At the time I was helming the Twitter account and I can’t confirm nor deny that there was quite a bit of a celebration when we saw Ramos Allup falling for it, but it wasn’t about that. The original campaign was about inflation (pre hyperinflation) and about including civilian figures on our new bills (which we knew were coming). This campaign is a little different. Now it’s about actual hyperinflation, and about finding new ways to fund independent journalism—and whether there could be a role for the blockchain in this space.

We encourage you to join our Twitter Space on Thursday, we’ll be discussing Venezuela’s insane monetary policy, the bills, the crypto talk, the campaign, and the future of Venezuelan journalism. Más ná 🙂