Now that I'm part of a Web3 company (TeiaSurf, whom I’m a co-founder of) I've noticed there's a couple of big bottlenecks in the crypto industry that has to be addressed before we start seeing "real" utility in the NFT space. There are a lot of cultural bottlenecks which will be challenging for the industry as a whole, but there are a number of practical issues that will also need to be solved as well. The cultural issues are subjective and messy, but here I’d like to focus on the more practical sides of the industry since you’re likely to find more agreement among the builders out there. Some of them are:

The idea of "smart investing" comes with the assumption that the market rewards reason and punishes irrationality in the long-term. What they don't tell you, though, is that the opposite is often true in the short-term. If you want to make money, more often than not you do have to have the discipline to move contrary to what most are doing.

Recently there’s been a surge of interest in artworks produced by “Artificial Intelligence” - and the fears that it may eventually end up “replacing” working artists since people would no longer have to commission art from human artists anymore. To the point where some people on GoFundMe are raising legal funds “in defense” of artists out there. Here are their demands:

Good Art = Ethical NFTs For a long time, there's been a concerted effort by many forces to sever the link between art and meaning. The only way for Web3 to thrive is to reconnect the two concepts systematically

Even after all that’s happened with the FTX meltdown and Sam Bankman-Fried so far, Kevin O’Leary (aka “Mr. Wonderful”) still claims that he still “likes the guy”. 🤯 Love is blind, but so is greed - especially so when it comes to the love of money as a thing in itself. There’s something weird going on here that I think is worth diving deeper into.

If you're looking for examples of DAOs that are working and functional, look no further than your web browser - ICANN is technically a DAO, minus the blockchain parts of it right now. It's decentralized, international, and its major decisions are done through the power of the vote.

Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) vs RR-BAYC - a bunch of nerdy white dudes accusing each other of being Nazis while using the same exact imagery (which still blows my mind) reminds me a lot of Silicon Valley politics: diversionary, unproductive, and largely misses the point.

In response to the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates yet again, the markets - both in stocks and crypto (and housing soon to come) - have been dropping pretty hard lately. For crypto investors out there: this is the sound of mainstream money from the general public leaving the space - they came for the party, then left after the party was over. The craze that we saw in 20’-21’ was really the result of NFT projects targeting people - largely cooped up indoors due to the pandemic - with a hype-based marketing strategy that seemingly resonated very strongly.

I feel like a million years old writing in this tone - though everyone in crypto knows that a week in this industry is equivalent to a year in “normal” time so being inside crypto-lala-land long enough does warp your sense of time. (The last few years of insanity in the world itself doesn’t help too, of course.)