A wise man — followed by millions of Millennials on social media — once said “I write to make sense of the world.”
I don’t. I write because I’m stuck in Detroit.
Awaiting a connection to New York, after a 5-hour layover, I’m here while my friends and colleagues are at NFT NYC. My original flight, a red eye from San Diego that would have gotten me home at 6:00 a.m., was cancelled for absolutely no reason. Ain’t no amount of writing ever gonna make sense of that.
But here I sit, writing. So, what about? For starters, to apologize for going dark the last 8 months. In that time, I made the jump to Web3 full time, joining Polygon Studios as Metaverse Lead and a member of its world class business development team. To say that we’ve been busy these last few months would be like calling the Titanic hitting that iceberg “an accident.” As a result, my writing suffered. I’ll try to do better. If you enjoy these musings, please, hold me to it!
Back to NFT NYC, there’s irony abound. Everywhere. After two cataclysmic events, the Terra/Luna death spiral and Celsius kinda-sorta-insolvency, the bear has officially slayed the bull, at least for the time being. But if you took a stroll down Times Square, the central location for NFT NYC, you wouldn’t know it. Among the PFP billboards and plethora of side events, 15,000+ Web3 enthusiasts are frolicking around the city (or so Twitter and Telegram tells me; remember, I’m still in the Motor City). Most of the grifters, charlatans and opportunists have receded into the shadows. However, the builders continue to build, and “our culture” continues to permeate “the culture.” As we prepare to cross the chasm into mainstream adoption, evangelists are singing ‘pon high, and the utopian side of WAGMI Culture propels us forward.
This doesn’t feel like the last bear. Or maybe I’m just calloused from having witnessed multiple 80%+ drawbacks over the years. But I really believe that. There’s too much value in the system. Real progress has been made. And the aperture on what the future may bring has sharpened. You can tell from the billions in venture capital that was raised by quality projects and by The Great Migration of brilliant minds from Web2 (shoutout to my colleagues at Polygon!).
There are no rose-colored glasses over here: it’s rough out there. However, if you take a long-term view and are macro-level in your thinking – if you have educated yourself and developed real conviction – you can start to appreciate certain benefits that come with the bear market: the signal separating from the noise, the ability to hold steady and focus on priorities and the appetite of ecosystem participants to experiment and collaborate in new and novel ways.
I hope to see you at NFT NYC, and I hope to write regularly again. (And from the comfort of my own home and not compelled by midwestern inertia.)