Man, like so much of crypto, Asteroid Protocol was a fever dream. I remember pitching the idea for an inscriptions protocol on Cosmos in a @delphi_labs Telegram chat. There wasn’t much response. Then, about 48 hours later, out of the blue, one of the best devs I’ve ever worked with, @donorail (who’s now building the biggest swap aggregator on Monad at @monorail_xyz), pinged me to say he’d finished building a prototype. That prototype already had everything: an indexer, a UI, an inscriptions scanner, a fungible token framework. The whole stack. Cosmos felt like the perfect home for inscriptions. It ran faster than bitcoin, and at the time it didn’t support permissionless smart contracts. Asteroid enabled fungible tokens and NFTs on the premier Cosmos chain for the first time ever. Within hours of launch, millions of transactions were executed, mostly minting $ROIDS. It all happened so fast I barely had time to mint a few batches myself. Over time, thousands of art collections and fungible tokens launched. We received grants and ran experiments with metaprotocols, games, and even a tokenized social protocol called Trollbox. But the part I value most is the people. I met artists and builders from all over the world. The feedback I heard again and again was that Asteroid was "easy to use." It didn’t require deep knowledge of blockchain architecture. You could upload an image and mint instantly, for a fraction of a penny. Ultimately, though, the crypto gods giveth and they taketh away. The meta shifted away from Cosmos, and now we’re here. The infrastructure may be winding down, but the inscriptions are still embedded in the Cosmos blockchain, and they always will be. They’re our digital footprints. As we pass through the unknowable horizon of autonomous technology, I’ve started to think of them like hieroglyphics in a cave. We were here. We explored the boundaries. We saw what was possible, and we acted. I want to say thank you to everyone who minted, transacted, or built on Asteroid. To the bridge operators, devs, Ark team, grant teams, marketers, space hosts, podcasters, and artists on the fringes, thank you. I wish it had kept growing and become the canonical protocol for permanent content. The gods had different ideas. But if you asked me whether I’d do it again, in that same time and place, the answer would still be yes. We can be paralyzed and dazzled by our social feeds and billion-dollar algos, or we can roll up our sleeves and act. Asteroiders were the ones who acted.