In the dark winter of 2016 I started working on a little animation to help lighten the mood on Ethtrader, just for fun. Besides, it helped me get a hang of a new GPU render engine I just started using at my day job.

Ether was stuck in a horrible bearmarket and even the most avid bulls seemed to have converted. In the midst of all the negativity it dawned on me how silly the whole trading dynamic really was, and I wanted to make a small animation about the endless swinging of sentiment.
As I worked on the looping 4 second animation I started adding more and more references to things that had manifested in the Ethereum scene during 2016.

Among the things referenced are: The -often times shady- exchanges profitting from the endless back and forth between traders, the invasion of downvoting sharks from hostile subreddits during the Fall 2016 attacks on the Ethereum network, Bitfinex exchange getting hacked, the infamous theDAO hack, the subsequent public lynching of the Slock.it-crew, the fork bringing justice upon the hacker of theDAO, the never ending crypto-mining and its distribution to the buyers, Kraken exchange buying Cryptowatch, the calming firepit where r/ethtrader mod u/jtnichol would adress the community and speak words of hope, Vitalik Buterin being the wielder of forks and myself hanging out on Green Candle island.

_kitteh