Cybernetic panda supremacy 🦾
Orbit
Joined October 2024
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I’ve never been more fearful about what the future of crypto might look like.
After the Binance hack, I took a day off to reflect on everything that’s happened over the last couple of years and the industry’s continuous quest to bring crypto mainstream.
One thing I couldn’t get out of my head is how most of the major crypto stories that make it beyond our little bubble are almost always negative.
Think about what the average person outside crypto has been exposed to.
They’ve heard about Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo scandal, Justin Bieber spending $2M on a Bored Ape that’s now worth around $10K, endless memecoin rugs, billions of dollars lost to hacks and exploits, and now another major security incident involving Binance.
The few times crypto makes mainstream headlines for something positive, it often comes with its own baggage. Trump’s memecoin was probably one of the biggest examples of crypto breaking into mainstream conversations, and we all know how that story unfolded.
I sometimes wonder what kind of impression all of this leaves on someone who has never interacted with crypto.
Imagine being an outsider. Every time you hear about this industry, someone has lost money, a project has rugged, an exchange has been hacked, or another high-profile individual has been caught up in some controversy.
At what point do you become comfortable putting your money into something like that?
This is what worries me about the whole mass adoption conversation.
We’ve spent years talking about bringing the next billion people into crypto, but I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about what those people currently associate with the industry.
Trust takes a long time to build, and unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to destroy it.
I honestly can’t say how we get past this or whether mass adoption is even possible with the level of fear and uncertainty surrounding the industry right now.
For now, a lot of what keeps people believing in crypto is hope that things will eventually get better.
And I hope that belief isn’t misplaced.
This shows how on-chain infrastructure is starting to attract attention from established financial institutions and investors.
The bigger opportunity is what happens when onchain infrastructure starts powering products people already want to use.
I think wallets becoming super apps is an interesting idea, but I have a slightly different view of where the real opportunity lies.
The part that interests me most is the amount of data a wallet can accumulate over time. It knows which assets you hold, which protocols you interact with, what you trade, how you move funds and, eventually, what your onchain behavior says about you as a user.
With enough data, a wallet could build a remarkably detailed picture of how people behave onchain. And I think this is where the real business opportunity lies.
Look at the AI industry. AI models are becoming part of people’s everyday lives, and every interaction creates opportunities to understand user preferences, behavior and intent. That information can become valuable to businesses looking to build better products, personalize their services or reach specific audiences.
Wallets could develop a similar position within crypto.
Imagine a wallet accumulating years of behavioral data across millions of users. DeFi protocols could use aggregated insights to understand user activity. Exchanges could identify different types of traders. Consumer apps could figure out which users are most likely to need their products. Institutions could use onchain behavioral patterns to build better risk models and financial services.
The wallet sits at the point where all these activities happen, which gives it a potentially valuable view of the market that individual applications may never have on their own.
IMO, this creates an opportunity for wallets to become data infrastructure for the entire crypto ecosystem. They could build the systems that collect, organize and interpret onchain behavior, then make useful insights available to businesses that know how to turn those insights into products and services.
And this is where I disagree slightly with the super-app thesis.
Building recommendations, social networks, reputation systems and dozens of other features might sound attractive, but each comes with its own product requirements, competition and execution challenges. A wallet trying to become everything risks spreading its resources across too many businesses.
We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in Web3, where companies expand into every adjacent opportunity instead of strengthening the business they already have.
I think the bigger opportunity is for wallets to become exceptionally good at understanding onchain activity and building infrastructure around that knowledge. Other companies can build the recommendation engines, financial products and social experiences on top of it.
Of course, monetizing this data won’t be straightforward. Much of onchain activity is already public, and users will rightly care about privacy, consent and how their information is used. A wallet’s advantage would have to come from organizing that activity across users, interpreting it in context and making the resulting insights useful to businesses.
The wallet could become the institution that understands onchain behavior, while an entire ecosystem of companies builds businesses around that understanding.
That’s a business model I find much more compelling than every wallet competing to become the next super app.
wallets becoming super apps feels kinda inevitable from here imo
the wallet already knows what you own, what you use and eventually what your onchain reputation looks like
thats an insanely powerful distribution + personalization layer
it can:
- recommend apps based on your history
- give you advantages based on reputation
- connect you with people with same profile
basically becoming the homepage of crypto, personalized around you
I’ve been thinking about the whole debate around token buybacks, and I think both sides have a valid argument.
On one hand, holders want to see the projects they support return some of the value they help create. On the other hand, there are people who believe buybacks are a short-term mechanism that doesn’t necessarily contribute to the long-term success of a project.
IMO, the underlying issue is a lot more interesting than whether buybacks are good or bad.
One thing I’ve always found interesting about Ethereum and Solana is that their tokens have had years to develop their own economic roles through the growth of their respective ecosystems. ETH is used to pay for transactions and secure Ethereum through staking, while SOL is used to pay fees and participate in Solana’s network economy.
Both networks have managed to attract users, developers and capital without making recurring revenue-funded token buybacks the central reason to hold their tokens.
Imagine if these networks had started with a buyback mechanism as a core part of their investment thesis. Would people have spent as much time exploring what they could build on these networks, or would a larger part of the conversation have revolved around how much revenue was being generated and how many tokens were being bought and burned?
Obviously, we can’t know the answer. But I think it’s worth asking whether introducing buybacks too early can influence the kind of people a project attracts before its technology has had enough time to prove itself.
This brings me to what I consider the biggest problem with buybacks.
A team can generate revenue, use a portion of it to purchase and burn tokens, and create a recurring source of buying pressure. Traders see this and begin pricing in future buybacks. Some will hold because they believe in the project, while others will hold because they expect the team to keep buying.
Both groups contribute to demand, but they are holding for different reasons.
And if the buyback becomes the primary reason people want the token, the team has created an expectation it must continue to satisfy. What happens when revenue declines, the market turns or the team decides that the money would be better spent on product development?
This is where I think the argument gets complicated.
Take Hyperliquid and HYPE, for example. Hyperliquid has built a highly competitive onchain perpetual futures exchange that generates substantial revenue from actual trading activity. The platform has demonstrated that people are willing to use its technology.
Yet the success of the exchange and the question of how much value should accrue to HYPE are two separate things. The buyback mechanism helps connect the economic activity of the platform to demand for its token, giving holders a reason to care about the revenue the business generates.
I understand why this makes sense. If a platform generates substantial revenue, holders naturally want to know how they benefit from that success.
But it also raises a question: how much of HYPE’s investment appeal comes from the platform’s technology, ecosystem and future potential, and how much comes from expectations surrounding future buybacks?
Those things can coexist. The existence of buybacks doesn’t mean HYPE holders lack conviction in the project. It simply means we should distinguish between demand driven by the product and demand driven by the token’s economic mechanism.
And to be clear, I don’t think teams should be allowed to generate revenue while ignoring the economic interests of their token holders indefinitely. If people provide capital and take on risk, they have every reason to question why the business is succeeding while the token struggles to capture any of that success.
However, I also think there is a danger in expecting every project to prove its commitment to holders through buybacks.
A new project needs room to experiment, find product-market fit and build something people genuinely want to use. If the team is already expected to dedicate revenue to buying tokens, that money comes with an opportunity cost. It could have gone towards hiring better developers, improving the product, attracting users or expanding the ecosystem.
The decision should depend on the stage of the project, the strength of its business and what it needs to accomplish next.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think the bigger question crypto needs to answer is how to create tokens that people have compelling reasons to own as the underlying technology becomes more useful.
Buybacks can be part of that answer. They can align incentives, create demand and return economic value to holders. But they can also attract capital that is primarily interested in the buyback itself.
For me, the goal should be to build projects where the technology creates real demand, the business generates sustainable revenue and the token has a credible way to capture some of that economic success.
The strongest position, IMO, is one where people have reasons to hold the token even when the team isn’t buying it.
That’s the kind of token economy I’d like to see more of in crypto.
Do you know how crazy this is?
Google is building a security system to help banks and financial institutions safely store and transfer cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets.
I think this is an important development that deserves more attention because of what it could mean for the future of crypto.
One of the biggest problems crypto has faced over the years is security. Billions of dollars have been lost to exploits, compromised wallets, phishing attacks and vulnerabilities in the infrastructure people rely on to protect their assets.
Even with the transparency and security guarantees of blockchain technology, the broader ecosystem still has weaknesses that make institutions and ordinary people hesitant to fully participate.
Now, think about what happens when companies like Google, with decades of experience building security infrastructure and protecting digital systems, begin developing solutions specifically for this industry.
Traditional financial institutions already have the trust of millions of people. They have established relationships with customers, regulatory frameworks, and the infrastructure to manage money at scale.
The challenge has been finding ways to bring these existing systems into the onchain economy without exposing customers to unnecessary risks.
This is where things get interesting.
If banks can securely custody and transfer digital assets, the possibilities extend far beyond people buying Bitcoin or trading tokens. We’re talking about tokenized stocks, bonds, real estate, and other assets that could move through financial infrastructure with fewer barriers.
And the implications go beyond finance.
What happens when other major technology companies begin integrating onchain infrastructure into products people already use every day? What happens when someone can benefit from blockchain technology without needing to understand wallets, private keys, gas fees or the technical details behind it?
This is how I think about mass adoption.
The average person doesn’t need to become a crypto enthusiast before using something built on crypto rails. They just need a product that works, a reason to use it, and enough trust to feel comfortable with it.
Companies like Google and the institutions they serve could help bridge that gap.
Of course, building this infrastructure doesn’t automatically solve every security problem, and institutional adoption doesn’t guarantee that the benefits will reach ordinary users. The execution still matters.
But I think the bigger picture is becoming increasingly interesting.
For years, crypto has been trying to convince the world to come to it. Now, some of the world’s biggest companies are exploring ways to bring its infrastructure into systems the world already trusts.
Imagine what becomes possible when that starts happening across multiple industries.
We’re still early in understanding what this could unlock.
NOVITÁ: an onchain TekTok ep1 🐼
I’ve been thinking about the different ways we could make crypto more accessible to people who have little to no experience using it, and I think one of the more interesting approaches is to build a bridge between Web2 and Web3.
The reality is that the Web3 ecosystem is still foreign territory for most people. The wallets, the interfaces, the transaction process, and the general user experience create a learning curve that most people have little incentive to overcome.
Which makes me wonder whether we’re approaching onboarding from the wrong direction.
Instead of expecting people to learn an entirely new system before they can benefit from it, what if we built around the things they already use and understand?
This is what caught my attention about ERC-8426.
For those unfamiliar, ERC-8426 is a proposed Ethereum standard built by @huntclubhero, it allows compatible NFTs to connect with passes in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
The idea is relatively straightforward. You could have a blockchain based asset that you interact with through the same interface you already use for concert tickets, boarding passes and loyalty cards, while the underlying technology handles ownership and onchain interactions.
And I think there’s something interesting about that approach.
Consider how many businesses already use digital memberships, loyalty programs and event tickets. These are things people understand, and the technology supporting them doesn’t need to be explained every time someone uses them.
Now imagine a concert ticket that lives in Apple Wallet, with ownership verified on-chain, the ability to transfer it under defined rules, and the option to retain it as a digital collectible after the event.
Or a loyalty card where your rewards are connected to an on-chain asset, or a digital collectible that evolves over time and can be interacted with directly through your phone’s wallet.
None of these ideas are particularly difficult to understand from a consumer perspective. The more interesting question is what blockchain adds to the experience.
For example, conventional systems can already handle tickets, memberships and loyalty points quite effectively. But they often operate within closed environments, where ownership, transfers and utility are controlled by the company running the system.
On-chain assets introduce the possibility of verifiable ownership, programmable transfer rules and interoperability with other applications. A ticket, membership or collectible could potentially retain utility beyond the platform that originally issued it, provided the relevant applications and businesses support that functionality.
There are still practical limitations to work through, of course. Putting an asset on-chain doesn’t automatically make it more useful, and businesses would still need to handle things like security, customer support and integration with their existing systems.
But I think the approach to user experience is worth paying attention to.
We’ve seen a similar idea in gaming with Off The Grid, which builds on familiar shooter gameplay while introducing Web3 ownership of in-game items and characters. Players can engage with a game they understand, while blockchain introduces a different way of owning digital assets.
Some people describe this general approach as Web2.5. Whatever you want to call it, I think there’s a reasonable argument for building around familiar experiences rather than expecting users to adapt to everything Web3 introduces.
WALLETCHI offers an early example of how this could work. Its pixel pet can be accessed through a mobile wallet pass, with updates and an additional game mode demonstrated during its testnet development.
It’s a relatively simple example, but it gets you thinking about what else could be built using the same approach.
Digital collectibles, memberships, tickets and other assets that change over time could all benefit from an interface people already know how to use. There are more ambitious possibilities around credentials and tokenized financial assets, although those come with considerably more technical and regulatory challenges.
To be clear, ERC-8426 is still a draft standard, and widespread adoption is far from guaranteed. Its implementation also relies on supporting infrastructure outside the blockchain itself. There’s a difference between demonstrating that something can work and establishing that people and businesses will actually use it.
Still, I think the underlying idea deserves attention.
Crypto has spent years developing new infrastructure and asking people to come into its ecosystem. Finding ways to make that infrastructure useful through existing consumer experiences could open another path to adoption.
If someone can access a digital asset, verify its ownership or use its benefits without having to understand every layer of technology underneath it, that removes some of the friction that has historically made Web3 difficult to approach.
And perhaps that’s where some of the more interesting opportunities lie: taking capabilities that already exist on-chain and finding ways to make them relevant to people who have never had a reason to care about blockchain in the first place.
The technology is still early, and we’ll have to see how far this approach goes.
But I think it’s worth watching.
Now that you mention this pattern, I’ve noticed it across almost every major meta in crypto. InfoFi, Ordinals, NFTs, and now memecoins have all followed a similar cycle.
But there’s another pattern worth paying attention to: the platforms that lead these metas often contribute to their decline by failing to adapt.
OpenSea for NFTs, Kaito for InfoFi, Magic Eden for Ordinals. These platforms benefited from the growth of their respective metas, but that doesn’t mean their decisions had no impact on how those markets evolved.
I think this is where I disagree with your argument.
You’re framing this as a natural feature of speculative markets, but I see it partly as a bug in how Web3 applications operate.
Traditional applications can maintain their dominance for years because they continuously improve their products, adapt to changing user needs, and prioritise customer satisfaction. Web3 applications often seem content to keep running the same playbook as long as it’s generating revenue.
Even when users are bleeding, the platform has little incentive to change its approach because it’s still making money.
But there’s a limit to how much users will tolerate. Eventually, liquidity dries up, participants leave, and the platform loses the very activity that made it successful in the first place.
Yes, every meta eventually becomes more competitive, and no platform can guarantee that users will keep making money. But there’s a difference between a market becoming less profitable and a platform failing to evolve as the market changes.
The decline of a meta might be inevitable, but the way a platform responds to that decline isn’t.
If development teams don’t learn from these cycles and build better products, align incentives with users, and adapt to changing market conditions, we’ll keep repeating the same pattern with every new meta.
The market will move on, users will get burned, and the platforms that once benefited from their activity will wonder where everyone went.
That’s not just a feature of the market. It’s a problem worth fixing.
I wanted to write a post this morning offering some honest thoughts on the whole "Pump fun is the enemy" discourse I've been seeing across the timeline.
As someone who has been here full-time since late 2020, this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to watching CT collectively turn against the very infrastructure that defined a previous market cycle.
In fact, I'd argue this is an almost predictable phenomenon that occurs at every major paradigm shift in crypto, particularly when we transition away from a dominant speculative asset class and towards whatever comes next.
The platform that facilitated the previous meta inevitably becomes the focal point of frustration when the economics underpinning that meta begin to deteriorate.
Most of you probably haven't been around long enough to remember, but we witnessed an almost identical situation with OpenSea during the transition away from NFTs in 2022–23.
At that point, there was virtually nothing OpenSea could have done to satiate its existing user base.
The NFT boom that it had largely facilitated was over, liquidity was evaporating, and the core participants who had previously made substantial amounts of money trading NFTs were suddenly finding it increasingly difficult to generate returns.
Predictably, people started to get pissed off.
OpenSea was suddenly extractive. OpenSea wasn't innovating. OpenSea wasn't doing enough for its users. OpenSea was responsible for the deterioration of the very market it had helped popularise.
And while there were certainly legitimate criticisms to be made regarding its business model the broader reality was that NFTs were simply no longer the dominant speculative asset class.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to imagine any realistic set of decisions OpenSea could have made that would have fundamentally reversed that trajectory.
The writing was already on the wall.
Yet, to this day, you'll still encounter people who genuinely believe OpenSea somehow "killed NFTs".
Which, to me, is an absurd interpretation of how speculative markets function.
No emerging asset class gets to enjoy an indefinite period of extraordinary returns, particularly once the opportunities that initially made it attractive become widely understood, commoditised and increasingly competitive.
And I believe we're now witnessing an almost identical phenomenon with pump fun.
Call it the OpenSea-ification of the trenches.
We're experiencing the gradual exhaustion of capital-M memecoins as the de facto speculative asset class of this cycle, and the platform most closely associated with their proliferation has become the natural target for everyone's frustration.
The uncomfortable reality is that most people, outside of a relatively small subset of sophisticated participants, simply aren't making meaningful money trading memes anymore.
There are numerous reasons for this, but without getting lost in the weeds, the underlying dynamics are relatively straightforward.
Liquidity is considerably more fragmented, the number of competing tokens and narratives has expanded dramatically, and the capital required to sustain the valuations we witnessed during the height of the mania simply isn't circulating through the market in the same way.
At the same time, the average participant is competing against an increasingly sophisticated group of traders who have spent years refining their strategies, infrastructure and understanding of the trenches.
This is an important point that I don't think gets nearly enough attention.
Every speculative asset class eventually becomes a more solved game.
The inefficiencies that initially created extraordinary opportunities are gradually arbitraged away. As more participants figure out how to play the game, the edge that once existed begins to disappear, and making money becomes increasingly difficult for the average trader.
Consequently, the risk/reward profile deteriorates for the average participant.
What was once an environment where relatively unsophisticated traders could generate extraordinary returns becomes one where those same participants are effectively competing against professionals.
This isn't a unique failure of memecoins.
It's how financial markets function.
It happened with NFTs, and it's happening with memes.
Which brings me to what I consider the fundamental misconception underpinning much of the current anti-pump discourse.
There's this persistent belief that if only pump fun had implemented different incentives, distributed fees differently, worked with different KOLs, or simply never existed in the first place, we'd somehow be living in a memecoin utopia where everyone continued making money indefinitely.
I find that argument deeply unconvincing.
For one, it assumes pump fun exists in a vacuum, rather than within an intensely competitive market where alternative platforms would inevitably emerge to service the same underlying demand.
Remove pump fun from the equation, and you don't magically remove the economic incentives that gave rise to it.
You simply create an opportunity for another platform to occupy the same position.
More importantly, it assumes that the structural deterioration in memecoin profitability is primarily a consequence of platform-level decisions rather than the natural maturation and saturation of the asset class itself.
I don't believe that's the case.
And to be clear, none of this is intended as an unconditional defence of pump fun.
There are absolutely decisions worth criticising.
But IMO the distinction I think people are missing is that...
A platform can make suboptimal decisions without being responsible for the structural decline of the market it operates within.
Even if pump fun had executed perfectly, two fundamental realities would remain unchanged.
First, crypto has largely failed to attract sufficient new capital and participants to sustain the increasingly large speculative ecosystems we've built across successive cycles.
Second, memecoin trading has become an increasingly competitive activity, where the average participant is now competing against a much more sophisticated and experienced subset of the market.
Neither of these problems disappears because pump fun changes its fee structure or starts working with different influencers.
And neither would disappear if pump fun ceased to exist tomorrow.
Simply put, people are looking for a platform-level solution to what is fundamentally a market-level problem.
I think that's the real source of the disconnect.
When an asset class stops generating the returns people have become accustomed to, it's psychologically much easier to identify a villain than to accept that the opportunity itself has fundamentally changed.
OpenSea became that villain for NFTs.
Pump fun is becoming that villain for memecoins.
And I suspect that when the next dominant speculative asset class eventually emerges, we'll watch this exact same cycle play out again.
None of this means platforms should be immune from criticism or that participants shouldn't demand better incentives, transparency and alignment.
They absolutely should.
But there's a meaningful difference between holding a company accountable for its decisions and attributing the inevitable maturation of an entire speculative market to that company's existence.
Until we start distinguishing between those two things, I think we're going to keep having the wrong conversation.
And sure, call me a pump fun shill if you want, but many of you made life-changing gains during peak memecoin mania precisely because pump democratised launches.
It's worth acknowledging that, just as it's worth recognising that the decline in liquidity and profitability isn't solely the fault of the launchpad that helped facilitate the boom.
Ultimately, I think it's worth asking whether any single platform could have fundamentally changed where we find ourselves today, or whether this was always the natural trajectory of the market.
Food for thought.
Someone borrowed $250K using a Zombie CryptoPunk NFT as collateral, and the entire transaction was completed in less than 5 minutes.
Compare that to traditional banking, where loan processing can take days or even weeks.
This is the kind of value NFTs and onchain technology can provide when given a real chance.
NFTs as a store of value make a lot more sense when you look beyond the art and speculation and start looking at their financial utility.
Introducing NOVITÁ: An Onchain TekTok.
A series exploring onchain technology and other emerging technologies that are building useful things for the real world.
The focus is simple: working technology, real utility, and products worth paying attention to. Not speculation, empty promises, or technology looking for a problem to solve.
I’ll be breaking down interesting projects, how their technology works, the problems they solve, and their potential beyond the crypto bubble.
The goal is to look beyond the noise and pay attention to what’s actually being built.
Episode 1 coming next.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in NFTs is the relationship between a collection’s success and the financial returns its holders should expect.
We’ve seen this conversation around collections like Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and others. As these projects expand beyond Web3, some holders feel neglected because the team is focused on building a broader brand rather than making the NFT collection the center of its strategy.
But I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to own art, a collectible, a token, or a stock.
These are different assets, and they don’t derive their value in the same way.
1. Why would anyone hold art for the long term?
People collect art for different reasons.
Some appreciate the artistic value. Others want to own a piece of cultural history, support an artist they believe in, express their identity, or possess something scarce that they believe others will value in the future.
The financial return is only one possible outcome.
Think about collecting Pokémon cards, Marvel collectibles, or original artwork. A franchise can generate billions in revenue without every collectible associated with it increasing in value.
The franchise’s success might bring more attention to the collectibles, but the value of each item still depends on factors such as demand, rarity, cultural relevance, condition, and what collectors are willing to pay.
NFT art works in a similar way.
If a collection becomes culturally relevant, more people might want to own its NFTs. That can increase demand and prices. But the brand becoming more successful doesn’t automatically create demand for every NFT in the collection.
A successful brand can make an NFT collection more desirable, but it cannot guarantee that its NFTs will appreciate.
This is why long term art collecting requires a different mindset from investing in a business. You need to understand what makes the artwork desirable in its own right, why people might continue to care about it, and whether future collectors will want to own it.
2. The stock market has a different relationship with revenue
In traditional markets, investors can buy shares in a company and gain an ownership claim on that business.
When a company grows its earnings, investors may value it more highly because they expect stronger future cash flows, dividends, or other economic benefits. Revenue alone doesn’t guarantee a higher stock price, but the relationship between business performance and shareholder value is established.
Crypto tokens work differently.
A project can generate millions in revenue without that revenue accruing to its token holders. The token needs a credible economic mechanism connecting the success of the business to the asset.
That mechanism could include revenue-funded buybacks, token burns, distributions where legally and structurally appropriate, or another clearly defined source of demand or value.
Without such a mechanism, buying a token because you believe the company behind it will succeed can be a flawed investment thesis.
You might be right about the company and still be wrong about the token.
NFTs introduce another layer of separation.
Owning an NFT does not automatically give you equity in the company, a share of its revenue, or a perpetual claim on the value of the brand.
Unless the terms explicitly provide otherwise, you could own a collectible associated with a successful business without receiving any of that business’s financial upside.
You can correctly predict a brand’s success and still lose money holding its NFT.
3. The Pudgy Penguins and Azuki conversation
Consider a project that starts as an NFT collection and eventually wants to become a mainstream consumer brand.
The founders might prioritize toys, games, entertainment, retail partnerships, and audiences who have never used a crypto wallet.
From a business perspective, this could be the right strategy. The team is trying to make its intellectual property relevant to a much larger audience.
But the NFT holder might have bought into a different vision: a thriving Web3 community in which the collection remains central and its success translates into a higher NFT floor price.
These two expectations can conflict.
Pudgy Penguins is an interesting case because it has pursued physical products and mainstream distribution while also creating licensing opportunities for holders. Its official licensing materials describe opportunities for holders to license their individual penguins for product and content initiatives.
Azuki raises a related question about how prominently a project presents its NFT origins as it develops its broader brand and entertainment ambitions.
The important distinction is that building a successful consumer brand and building financial value for NFT holders are separate objectives unless the business deliberately connects them.
A project can succeed at the first while disappointing holders who expected the second.
We should also be careful not to treat every expansion beyond Web3 as evidence that founders are exploiting their communities. A broader audience can benefit a collection by increasing its cultural relevance. The real question is whether holders have a clearly defined way to participate in that success, beyond hoping the floor price rises.
4. Are founders using Web3 communities to fund businesses outside Web3?
The answer is both yes and no.
NFT collections can give founders access to capital, early customers, distribution, attention, and a community willing to support an unproven idea.
The community takes a risk on the possibility that the project will become something much bigger.
That arrangement can be mutually beneficial. Early supporters might receive a collectible that appreciates, access to experiences, commercial rights, or other benefits. Founders receive the resources and attention needed to build the business.
But the incentives are not always aligned.
A founder may see the NFT collection as the starting point for a much larger company. A holder may see the company as a way to make the NFT more valuable.
Both can believe in the same project while expecting entirely different outcomes.
This is where holders need to understand the game they are playing.
Are you buying art you genuinely want to own? Are you speculating on attention? Are you betting on a future consumer brand? Or are you assuming that business revenue will somehow flow back to your NFT?
These are different investment thesis, and each requires different evidence.
If your thesis depends on a financial relationship that the project has never promised, you are taking a risk based on your own expectations rather than an enforceable entitlement.
5. Perhaps the problem is the ownership model itself
This brings me to a more interesting question: what if NFTs evolved to give holders a more active role in the commercial success of the intellectual property they own?
Imagine buying an NFT of a character and receiving clearly defined, transferable commercial rights to that character.
You could use it to create videos, build a social media personality, produce merchandise, develop a game, or license it to a business that wants to use the character in its products.
If the character becomes popular, you could benefit from the demand you helped create.
The collection would no longer depend entirely on the founding team to generate attention and create value. Every holder could become a potential contributor to the brand’s growth.
Some holders might make content. Others might build physical products, develop games, or negotiate licensing deals. The strongest characters could develop their own audiences and businesses.
The collection would become an ecosystem of independently operated IP rather than a group of people waiting for a central team to deliver value.
There is an important distinction here: buying an NFT does not automatically transfer copyright or commercial rights. Those rights need to be explicitly granted through the applicable license or legal agreement.
But that is exactly why the ownership model matters.
6. What if holders could turn their characters into businesses?
Imagine a collection of 10,000 unique characters.
Under the conventional model, holders buy the characters, trade them, use them as profile pictures, and wait for the founding team to make the collection more valuable.
Under a more developed ownership model, each character could have its own commercial life.
One holder could turn their character into a successful YouTube personality. Another could create a clothing brand. Someone else could use theirs in a game or license it for a physical collectible.
The creator of the character could earn money from their work, while the broader collection benefits from increased attention and cultural relevance.
The NFT would represent a transferable set of rights to that particular character, as defined by its license. When the NFT changes hands, the associated rights would transfer according to those terms.
This could also create a stronger reason to hold an NFT long-term. You would not simply be holding an asset and hoping someone else makes it more valuable. You would own something you could actively develop, commercialize, or license.
There would still be no guarantee of financial success. Most characters and businesses would not become popular, and holders would need to respect the collection’s licensing terms, trademarks, and other applicable rights.
But at least the path to creating value would be more tangible.
7. The future of NFTs should not be limited to floor prices
I think Web3 needs to rethink how it approaches NFT ownership.
Not every collection needs to distribute revenue. Not every NFT needs commercial utility. Art should be allowed to exist as art, and collectors should be free to collect without expecting a financial return.
But when a collection is marketed around intellectual property, commercial opportunities, and the ambition to become a global brand, the relationship between the brand and its holders deserves much more thought.
If the long-term vision is to create valuable characters and intellectual property, why should all commercial opportunities depend on the founding team?
Why can’t holders build businesses around the assets they own? Why can’t a character’s success come from the community as well as the core team? And why shouldn’t those rights be clearly defined from the beginning?
The goal should not be to force every NFT into a financial instrument. It should be to give collectors a clearer understanding of what they own and, where appropriate, the tools to create value from it.
Lots of you are getting so caught up in memecoin gambling that you’ve started acting like it’s the only way to make money in crypto.
You’ve forgotten that crypto is an entire industry with multiple niches you can learn, build in, and profit from.
I see crypto as a form of leverage on other industries. As a writer, crypto gives you an opportunity to build an audience, monetize your knowledge, and earn from a niche that values your expertise.
As an analyst, you can specialize in crypto, build a reputation for your research, and monetize insights that people are willing to pay for.
The same applies to artists, developers, designers, creators, streamers, marketers, and many others.
Crypto can give these skills access to global audiences, new business models, tokenized communities, and financial opportunities that might be harder to access in traditional industries.
Look at what’s happening outside crypto today. The creator economy is growing, businesses are investing more in creators, and professionals are finding new ways to monetize their skills independently. The opportunity is no longer limited to getting a job; it’s increasingly about building an audience, developing expertise, and creating something people value.
Crypto offers another layer to that opportunity.
Of course, none of this guarantees instant money. It takes time to build credibility, develop a skill, attract an audience, and earn a reputation. But the upside can be significantly greater when you combine a valuable skill with an industry that rewards early participation and global distribution.
This is why I sometimes feel like people losing money to ruggers is a necessary wake-up call.
Not because I enjoy seeing people lose their money, but because the market needs to learn that crypto is not a get rich quick scheme.
You can spend years jumping from one memecoin to another, hoping to catch the next 100x, or you can spend those years developing a skill, building a reputation, and positioning yourself in an industry that’s still evolving.
One approach depends heavily on timing and speculation. The other gives you something you can build on, even when the market is down.
Crypto is bigger than gambling. Stop treating it like a casino when it can also be an industry where you build a career, a business, and long-term wealth.
