Election results are turning out pretty much as expected, but might be a good time to bring this post up again. 1. Trump was not good for the Web3 industry overall, despite attempts to placate him. People know about $TRUMP and $MELANIA, and not in a good way. Lobbying efforts in DC have all failed, and we ended up looking like chumps in the eyes of the rest of the world. 2. That being said, I understand why things turned out this way. The Biden administration was extremely hostile to crypto, to the point where they tried to ban it outright. (I would know, because I'm from Hawaii - the only state where it was made illegal.) 3. The folks winning now are not your run-of-the-mill Democrats. They are progressives, and have no love for the establishment, either. Most of them hate crypto, but then again, that's true for the public in general so that's here nor there. But unlike the incumbents, they are not entrenched by corporate interests so there is a chance they can be won over. 4. In order to do that, the industry needs people who will repudiate and condemn the rampant scams and fraud that has plagued the industry for a long time and focus back on the first principles that got folks excited about crypto and NFTs to begin with. 5. If there's a time to grow a spine, it would be now. Build something actually useful. Call out ponzis and bad behavior. There is a limited time to do this - otherwise the world will just adopt CDBCs and existing coins will become a footnote in history and the rest will get regulated out of existence, most likely.

"Infinite demand" 😂 I'm glad his "ETH to $20k" prediction was way off, otherwise I might've regretted my decision to sell.

The reputation around NFTs and crypto has gotten so bad lately that many places have begun using different terms altogether - in the West, most industry events have pivoted to "tokenization," while Japan officially switched from "virtual currency" (kasou tsuuka) to "angou shisan (暗号資産)," which translates directly to "cipher assets." Functionally, they're all the same thing. They're blockchain-based frameworks, and many companies and organizations are still talking about them because they still believe in the technology's potential - just not the earlier versions of it. These are signs that institutional players are ready to move on - if they haven't already. As someone who has pretty much gone all in on alts (I was an early supporter of Bitcoin and Ethereum but have since moved on), this puts me in an awkward position, because alts sit in a middle ground between the original crypto coins and pure CBDCs meant purely for utility, without the speculative side. Is it possible to get a return on investment with crypto coins anymore without turning it into a Ponzi? With AI, creating your own coin or token is as easy as it has ever been - but where is the future value of crypto really going to come from, especially for projects that have been around for a while?

To be fair, banks experience fraud and hacks all the time and they spend way more in compensating losses than crypto ever will - credit card hacks, anyone? But I think the real lesson here is that we don't need crypto exchanges to be banks, too. Banks already exist and they do what they do pretty well, for better or worse. Exchanges were created to make money flow, not to store them. (And out in the open, of all things.)

For both @tezcity and @objktcom, I would suggest integrating token-gating features into the social side so there's some incentive for collectors to buy the NFTs themselves. (@TeiaCommunity already has them.) If we don't give people more reasons to actually spend the money on the thing we're selling, we're as good as dead. The harder we push, the better.

Now that Farcaster has started kicking out anyone who won't vote yes ("democracy" in action), a lot of people have been looking for alternatives to Web3 socials. Luckily, a few of them are already up and running. Even if you're not in Web3, these platforms are worth a look. They're brand new and growing, and people are excited about them for a reason: you can get the kind of engagement there that's hard to find anywhere else. They're still early enough that they haven't been spoiled by algorithms chasing cheap clicks, or by censorship. TEIA @TeiaCommunity · TezCity @tezcity · objkt social @objktcom

I'm classically trained and come from a traditional arts background (been using my own music for our company's promo videos lately if you want to check them out) but I think a lot of the sentiment around the anti-AI camps have it all wrong - they should be welcoming the new cohorts of people identifying as "AI artists" with open arms. Here's why: • Criticism from the public around your art is part of being an artist - which many of them are learning as we speak. • For a lot of people - especially if they weren't privileged enough to have access to lessons when younger - AI is their "entry point" into learning the craft. The ones that want to take it to the next level will eventually get interested in learning the fundamentals (theory/form/composition/meaning/etc.) to improve their output. • Both traditional and AI artists face the same problem: "how do I get paid for this?" There's a lot of things in the art/content spaces that needs fixing and this is an opportunity to get more people on the side of copyright/IP/royalties reform. • As of now, AI-generated content is flooding all platforms everywhere, which will eventually cause the entire model to collapse - or, force companies to take the idea of quality control more seriously. (See above: the way to get quality is to actually pay the folks doing the work.) • Recent AI models - as a combination of necessity and regulations - now are pretty good at giving attribution to its sources. This paves the way for royalties models that were not possible before. I was always an AI-skeptic and still am - I get the frustrations behind the tech because early models were doing some blatantly illegal things, which has landed a lot of them in trouble now. But don't let that allow you to punch downwards or sideways - we don't need artists fighting other artists because that's exactly what they want. The battle isn't traditional artists vs AI artists, but artists vs. the law. If you're going to get mad, do it with issues worth getting mad about - look up the Berne Convention and how it *doesn't* apply to creatives in the US, regardless of how the work was made. That's the stuff we should be focusing on if you really want things to change.

Early AI models were built on the public resources available on Stack Overflow. What AI did was basically reduced the hassle of having to look it up yourself. But with the incentives to share your work removed, where will the next wave of innovations and solutions come from? If people don't code by hand, we'll just be recycling the same code over and over. Interestingly enough, this is a similar problem that the content/creative industries have been facing for a long time. With creator pay shrinking as a whole (and the risk of having your work stolen with no recourse basically running rampant), many artists have simply stopped engaging with digital platforms as a whole, and is quickly being replaced by AI-generated content that is flooding everything we see. Personally, I don't see this as a technology problem - it's an incentive problem. We have to give creators more reasons to share their work or we will see all of this race to the bottom, eventually.

Regardless of whether you agree with this sentiment or not, there are signs that investor sentiment is about to shift. AI has failed to show profitability (as expected) and people are starting to look elsewhere.