07.07.2022
Phantom Network: Ghost Op. 001
331 Storm Ave.
New Central City, NCC70922

Overview

Massive unrest in the city following the Market crash. Chaos in the streets, people stealing from each other and attacking each other to survive. Trust in the establishment is at an all-time low. Many leaders of the Resistance, the People's Hope, are nowhere to be found. Rumors say abandonment, disappearance, or worse, capture. Where are the Phantoms? Any Ghosts & Phantoms that remain, should you believe when all belief is lost, this is your signal; let your Regiments know now, more than ever, the fate of “the City” relies on you. Your mission; Rally your fellow Ghosts. Locate the Origin.

Objectives

1. Rally your fellow Ghosts. Let them know that the Resistance is still alive. The Origin lives.

2. Save any captured Phantoms, but do so safely. Your survival, Ghosts, is as it has always been; The Origin's priority.

3. Seek the Architects - they know the way.

Briefing

12/xx/2021 - 05/05/2022

For decades, New Central City (also known as “the City”) has seen only failed leader after failed leader, corruption after corruption. Every rising leader falls into the temptation of power & riches. We, the people, were at first disappointed. With time, disappointment becomes difficulty, difficulty becomes stress, stress becomes anger, anger leads to unrest until a new hope arises. And with each hope failing at the test, the people find sadness; sadness turns to cynicism, cynicism becomes apathy, and apathy leads to acceptance & toleration of governmental use & abuse. Abuse became the norm, and all the people knew was the worst, which they accepted as standard…until the Resistance.

The formation of the Resistance in 2013, masterminded by he who is known as The Origin, and led by leaders risen from the people over the years, was built for nearly the last decade to be an underground Network of individuals known as Ghosts–people woke to the realization that they were pawns manipulated by the government, farmed for liquidity, whose lives were controlled by a narrative, a lie they were raised to believe. Ghosts, the representation that these individuals were done with the version of themselves that believed in that lie. Each Ghost, bearing The Mark somewhere on their bodies, proudly wears the symbol of Choice, the choice that “if to live means not to be able to choose, and not to be the owner of our own identities, we instead choose to be Ghosts.”

12/21 marked the start of preparations for upturning the authority of New Central City. Five months of planning, morale in the underbelly reached an all-time high. The resistance we’d all been waiting for was on the horizon. On the night of the resistance, 5/4, operations looked to be in mint condition. It was a week-long war in the city, and things had gone so smoothly, most of it. We had surprised the government bots with a new technology deployed into the mainframe that disrupted all of them from being called to arms as the battle ensued. Led by 30 Phantoms, everything was going according to plan.

5/13: Reveal Day. We call it Reveal Day now because at the peak of what looked to be a sure success, the people of the City–against anything we could have anticipated–banded together and called our upsurge propaganda. “Don’t believe them! They just want to be the next Power!”

Many Ghosts were lost in the coming days and weeks (eventually known as The Fallout). Phantoms went missing. Faithful Ghosts & Phantoms went into hiding, and a decade’s worth of planning was foiled…just like that. 5/13…the day that revealed to us the people of New Central City aren’t yet ready for a revolution like we’d thought.

Ghosts & Phantoms, your mission is to locate your brothers & sisters who remain and tell them: The Origin lives. Seek the Architects. We need more than a Resistance.

…We need a Network.

I was born in the Slums, possessed little to nothing. Having to fend off constant threats of thieves and the occasional wild animals, I was left alone. My parents left for the outer city when I was eleven and never returned. Since then, I have had to adapt to survive. Growing up on scraps and waste, I lived in hunger. When I was 15, I worked on a local farm harvesting corn in the outer city. My boss was a lovely old man living alone with his dog, Bucky. Ever since his wife passed on, I have been keeping him company and maintaining his source of income for him. All the heavy lifting and physical labor forced my body to grow. I never had formal education, but life was peaceful. I had food and shelter.

One day, men in suits alighted from their blacked-out limousine and knocked on my boss's door. Those corporate scums. They took him into the car and drove away. I waited. For three days with no sleep, wondering when he would return. On that fateful night, all I heard was shouting. All I could smell were fumes, and all I could see was the corn farm going out in a horrific blaze. My boss never returned, and Bucky, well…

It must be them. Those working under him. Boss must've refused to sell the land to them. They think that they can take away our rights by force. Somebody needs to do something. I'll be that somebody, someday.

On the 6th of May, 10,000 ghosts were recruited. I was one of the lucky few drafted. My dream? To stand at the frontlines with my brothers and sisters in arms, to stand for our cause, for the Resistance. Our time was now. After months of mental and physical rigorous training, it was time to enter basic training. We were all given our IDs at the entrance of the Mainframe.

HQ was not what I expected. We entered through the sewers from the outer city, the stench of sewage wafting through the air and becoming increasingly pungent with every breath I took. We entered through a side door guarded by rusty steel bars. It was buried, away from sight, 60 feet below ground. When the lift doors opened, I was stepping into a new world. Weapon boxes lined the entrance as though they were guards of honor, welcoming our presence. I shot a quick glance across the area and saw some active personnel. Some were geared up with technology one could only dream about; others were clad in fast food chain uniforms.

Logistics were being handed out to us. Our tools. Our weapons of destruction were being handed to us like candy at a candy store. I was being placed into the Army Branch. One of the largest forces making up the Resistance.

All of a sudden, an announcement blared through the speakers:
"ATTENTION, ALL NEW OPERATIVES TO REPORT TO THE TERMINAL."

It was too late to back out now.
It was all getting too real.
It was enlistment day.

In this week’s edition of PXN Papers, we will explicate our viewpoint and approach to Community.

2022 introduced to the NFT space a heavy emphasis on the word “community.” “Community” saw its place in NFT project marketing the same way “roadmap,” “utility,” and “doxxed founders” did during various other periods as a means to sell the validity or buy-worthiness of one's project.

Prior to this, the emphases had been on utility & doxxed founders, in light of all-time high-volume transacting periods late December and early January, witnessing dramatic quantities of low-or-no utility launches and rug pulls from low-transparency teams. People learn, and the public essentially learned that: “useless NFTs are useless,” and “transparency is important.” As web3 evolves, people will point out what's worth focusing on and what needs fixing.

The first people to emphasize community as a selling point brought attention to an at-the-time under-highlighted essential of web3: people. If you are going to tell a community: “[something] is important,” the number one thing you can say is probably that they are.

As it should be. The community ought to be one of a project team’s top focuses, for so many reasons, so when it was first highlighted, it immediately took the space by storm. For a while, nearly every project proposal in the NFT space included Community at the forefront of its mission statement. The word was so relevant during that meta of NFTs that it had noticeable impact on project launch performance in the space for quite some time, and marketers would begin selling the word “community” absent of its essence (unfortunately with success).

To say that you care about Community and to actually care about the Community are two different things.

When we at PxN say, “PxN is half about tech, half about [community]” (PXN Papers Issue 1), we mean that we meet for hours on end with our entire staff just to speak about our community and how we will better serve them: you. We mean that our team, at all levels all the way up to the founders, take time out of their exhausted schedules at the ends of their work days and during breaks to actively interact with the community in Discord and on Twitter. We mean that every person on the Project PxN team has the hybrid role of engaging with the community in addition to their main role in PxN. Community is not just something we talk about; community is something we actually care about.

Community is something we truly care about and we have an infrastructure wherein a large number of our staff come from within our community, via our events & rewards systems, toward whom we allocate a sizable portion of our funding, labor, and focus in our operations. We ambitiously aim to engage with every single person that engages with us, regardless of their holdings, age, gender identification, background, country, and otherwise, and lastly, in recognition through the inclusion of community-created subgroups, interests, and ideas into our marketing, art creation & community chatter (e.g. we see you Harmony, Vandals, Spies, Veezeus & PSB).

We understand that we are made possible through the support, belief, and help of our community, and we aim to show this gratefulness every day.

Hello everyone! It’s me, your favorite analyst. What an interesting week we've had in the world of finance - I believe that it's important to examine various circumstances occurring in the world outside of Crypto to understand how and why it could have an impact on our investments. We’ll take a peek into some of the basic fundamentals behind economics in order to help you stay ahead of the trends - all aboard the Gainz train.

Let's talk about the essentials of supply and demand. In a nutshell, when there is excess supply of something with high price tags, the demand decreases. When there is a limited supply, especially with lower prices, the demand increases and sales occur at a faster rate. An example of supply and demand would be the US housing market.

In recent years, we've seen the supply of available homes for sale decrease, with a higher appetite for new home buyers accompanied by record low interest rates which shifted the prices higher because sellers knew their value. Currently, we are seeing lesser demand for homes, specifically in the US, but why is that?

As loan interest rates rise, consumers have less purchasing power and are getting priced out of the market at the current high listing prices. As that demand decreases, sellers are forced to lower their asking prices if they want to sell - similar to what we see in the NFT market.

Touching more on interest rates, the past week we saw the CPI report from the FED come in at a higher percentage than Wall Street analysts predicted. Why are we talking about inflation and interest rates, what does that have to do with crypto, Gainz?

When markets face inflation data as high as it is currently, the FED steps in and adjusts interest rates to slow down the economy and bring the supply and demand curve closer to a balanced equilibrium, in hopes of decreasing the inflation percentage. With a slower economy, and less overall spending, businesses and your investments suffer, especially when there is a potential global recession storm brewing. A slower economy and less spending from the FED's over-adjustment could bring us closer to a recession and cause fear in investors.

Tying these market adjustments into crypto investments, investors attempt to beat the data to the finish line, so typically we see the news already priced into the markets prior to their release. With the CPI report released on Wednesday, the crypto market saw a substantial drop rather quickly, and it even had drops priced in during the days leading up to it in anticipation of bad news, but it recovered soon after and has been trending upwards since.

Although the July Consumer Sentiment data from the University of Michigan slightly rose, it remained relatively unchanged from the June data. This, in the eyes of investors, was a better sign than any decrease.

The cost of living has increased substantially with inflation going higher year over year from 2021 to 2022, affecting commodities (namely energy and food), as well as the prices of housing, thus putting consumers' personal finances and living standards at risk. Simply put, there are other economic factors outside of the crypto space that have an impact on the crypto market's price action.

Key factors:

• More big players and institutional money in the crypto markets than that of previous years = higher volatility when they are adjusting their portfolios in anticipation of key economic data being released.
• Large-scale institutional portfolio shifts can create fluctuations in price that produce panic selling or FOMO buying from smaller retail investors like me and you.

Circling back to cryptocurrency, It can be assumed through previous price data that coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are close to key levels of previous support, both on a technical and fundamental level. Psychologically, the market wants to keep Ethereum's price over $1,000, so when prices neared those lower levels recently, demand increased, and the price went up because retail investors were on the sidelines waiting to buy in.

At current levels between both support and resistance trendline zones, also known to traders as the range bound, accompanied with the global economic uncertainty, it's difficult for any investor or analyst to say with certainty which direction it will head in the short term, even though most will tell you “ETH to 0” or “to the moon”.

News related influence on prices can be seen from Ethereum’s price elevation this past week as developers loosely arranged a date in September for the long awaited ETH 2.0 merger. On release of the considerably bullish news, prices surged around 18%, and have since settled down slightly lower as the increased demand stabilized establishing a new range for short-term resistance and support zones before continuing the short-term upside.

Daddy’s two-cents:

Alright, that was a long ride. We’ve arrived back at the station and I hope you have learned something from me. The key takeaway from this would be understanding economic adjustments and market news, both inside and outside of the cryptocurrency space. These can have short and long-term repercussions or positive impacts indirectly on our investments. It’s crucial as it can help you determine your most efficient trading strategy. As always, DYOR NFA and all that. Signing off for today, I hope you enjoyed the ride on the Gainz train. Till next time.

*DISCLAIMER: PRICES CORRECT AT THE TIME OF WRITING.

Welcome to the Pineapple Lounge! Plortis and I will feature several outstanding Ghost operatives this week. We're always looking for community members to spotlight here, so send us your recommendations! Our PXN Papers team is actively on the lookout and reporting to HQ.

We would like to highlight supportive community members that have rallied with us since The Fallout. Here’s a dawdle.

“PxN is truly a great community and a family I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.”

- Kingetsu

@Kingetsuu

“It's been a tough few months, but now we are seeing a true foundation of people in our community. This is still just the beginning of something great and I’m glad to still be a part of it, with all of you.

Hi Pants!”

- Geets

@pngeets

Don't be like this guy.

“Enter the Greymarket, a P2P marketplace to trade physical and digital goods. I believe it is at the forefront of innovation by bridging a marketplace of physical items to the web3 space.”

- Moodi

@HeyMoodi

“The economic value created by users should be captured by those users, this is the fundamental transition from web2 to web3”

- Dex

@dexd0x

A town hall was recently held for Ghosts in the Inner City. SONIX (@sonix_eth) has compiled the information for Ghosts and potential recruits at the outskirts of the city.

His personal goal was to lower the barrier of entry of NFT tools while maintaining exceptional quality. SONIX mentioned that he wanted everyone to have access to the right instruments to make informed decisions while keeping price points affordable.

“I really want to tackle this issue and ensure quality tools are available to everyone!”, SONIX says.

For SONIX’s assistance in broadcasting information in such detail for those unable to attend the town hall, we would like to present to him the Resistance Strategist medal!

Thank you, SONIX!