Why you should(n't) join the de community
I've always hated NFTs.
From a conversation I had with a friend in 2021:
To be clear, I don't dislike JPEGs. Good art is dope.
I also have no problem with people making a lot of money on the internet. My biggest financial wins were an ICO called Antshares (rebranded as $NEO), which I sold at an $8 billion market cap, and my Dogecoin swing trades:
I hate NFTs because the vast majority of collections and their holders are painfully mid.
History can actually point to the exact moment in time this happened.
The CryptoPunks craze kicked off the 10k PFP project meta, which drove up mint prices, which drove in venture capital interest, which forced creators to craft exaggerated roadmaps to justify inflated valuations.
The result was inevitable. Yuga is now building a video game, Azuki is making an anime, Pudgy Penguins are in Walmart, and community members are larping as entitled angel investors in these companies.
The truth is, the current "10k PFP NFT to building a business" model only exists because of the incentive structures provided by normie capital, projects that tout "utility" are facades, and most holders are just whiny shills waiting for someone else to buy their NFTs at higher prices.
I say all of that with confidence because I've been guilty of the same sins.
When I joined de[labs] in April 2023, we had just raised funding for Dust Labs, bridged to ETH, minted BTC DeGods, and hosted DeNYC. Vibes were good and DeGods sat at a 9 ETH floor price.
But then we got lost in the sauce.
We're a legitimate SaaS company now, let's ship software products and secure real partnerships.
DeadGods look too gory, let's clean up the collection for a broader audience.
We have a supportive community, let's leverage it to get sponsorship ad dollars and give away a Tesla.
All while hyping up that we'd be #1 by the end of the year.
There were moments when we almost snapped out of it. Points Parlor was originally a fun, degenerate loot box game. The art upgrade was going to be DeadGods remastered, de-rugging floor traits and making grails cooler.
But we wanted to pump our floor prices so badly that it clouded our judgment. We kept adding more and more layers, and turned every left-curve idea into a mid-curve one.
In mid-June we knew we didn't have "the nuts", so we made a retro-Facebook landing page delaying the launch that was ironically cooler than all of Season 3.
But that's the thing about getting lost in the sauce - you don't realize how far gone you are until it's too late.
Most people view our floor prices dumping to be the worst consequence of Season 3.
I don't see it that way. NFT floor prices were always going to go down in the next cycle.
The crypto space always chases the newest, shiniest thing, and NFTs without some technical advancement will never be that again.
We're watching this play out in front of our eyes right now - an NFT's speculative appeal can't possibly match that of a memecoin like $MOG with a 420.69 trillion supply.
I've been consistent on this stance. We did an AMA in our Discord the day that Season 3 launched, and a holder asked me if I "expected" our price to go down. I said yes, and got vilified for it at the time. Perhaps I could've provided more context for my reasoning, but when asked direct questions I tend to answer them honestly.
The real tragedy of Season 3 wasn't our floor price going down.
It was the culture deterioration.
A lot of de holders that joined during Season 3 never understood the history. They saw our culture, but mistook it as a byproduct of the floor price of the JPEGs, not the community of people behind them.
The rise of DeGods and y00ts was not a lucky accident. We were the project that created the Paper Hand Bitch Tax, upgraded to DeadGods, purchased a basketball team, reimagined community formation with y00tlist, brought our collections to multiple chains, and inscribed an entire Bitcoin block.
There was no roadmap, only experimentation. Just a bunch of degenerates, punks, misfits, builders, creators, and artists. The underdogs that always showed up.
But after we became the #1 project on Solana, bridged to Ethereum, and flipped Azuki, we became soft. In came people trying to ride our coattails to the top, joining us not for community nor creativity but for profits, expecting returns simply for holding a JPEG.
We've been feeling the negative effects of the culture rot for months now.
Every single day I go on Twitter and Discord and see people with our PFPs complaining about some random bullshit.
The anxious reactions to the Wormhole airdrop - which will likely be tens of millions of dollars worth of free, liquid tokens to DeGods and y00ts - were the coup de grâce. We knew that something had to change.
A few days later, Frank posted the infamous "this is not a bull post / let it go lower" tweet:
"Let it go lower" is our declaration that de is now post-price, and thus mid-proof.
We're no longer worried about anyone in our community selling our assets. We never have to pay attention to the people who don't share our values again. In fact, we'll start asking them directly to leave.
There's no room for half-believers. Only conviction wins in the end. We're finally free to play long term games with long term people.
Here's what I want to see more of in the de community:
People with an extreme sense of self-ownership.
People who are passionate about art.
People who are deeply comfortable with ambiguity.
People who love to create and build things.
People who act with integrity, always.
It's pretty simple. Money and technology will make most things commodities. But culture can never be bought, and if we make it anti-fragile, it can never be killed in a way that matters.
Our vision is to build the best communities on the Internet.
Join us if you want to be a part of it.