Having been in the "Web3" space since 2014, I've seen a lot of phrases come and go in the crypto ecosystem...well for one, "Web3" itself is actually a term that didn't exist until relatively recently. Where did it come from? What does it mean? It probably originated from the Ethereum ecosystem somewhere, where they used it as a catch-all phrase to everything related to cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies, metaverse and NFT projects, etc.

Same goes with the phrase "HODL" - a lot of people think it actually stands for something (Hold Onto Dear Life?) but it really was just the result of some drunk guy on the internet shit-posting about his investment "strategy" on a forum somewhere. Nonetheless, because most people don't bother reading the fine print (though it's not that "fine", if you click the above 🤣) the misinformed narrative seems to just propagate, regardless of the truth. At this point the phrases "Web3" and "HODL" have been so diluted that its usage has to be over-explained just to be able to talk about it - the phrases themselves have lost all meaning other than a buzzword used for marketing purposes at this point.

Why am I even bringing this up? Well, these are a few examples of how people's desire for soundbites and meaning (even when it doesn't exist) can be very powerful factors in why certain phrases become popular over others. But after having gone through a few crypto cycles already, I can say with some confidence now that the projects with the biggest success (both in the markets and in sustainability) come from when words and gestures still mean something: otherwise known as "authenticity".

Technical/financial analysis, venture forecasts and hype, the talking heads in the media/internet - none of that matters. If you're looking to be part of those elusive "unicorn" stories, you have to be able to clear your mind of the noise and double-down on the truth. I'll explain below - at least from my perspective of how I was able to "make it" through a few winter cycles of my own.

Authenticity = Biggest Returns

People close to me probably already know that I was in the Ethereum ICO in 2014 - mostly because I thought the idea of "smart contracts" might be able to help me out as a musician, still struggling to monetize my works. Later (around 2017 or so) I was spending most of my days trying to survive in the Silicon Valley Bay Area - which most people know by now isn't an easy thing to do, given the high costs of living there. There was a point where my bank account was nearing 0, and I had all but given up hope...but magically, whoa, this weird "crypto" thing that I bought a few years ago mostly out of curiosity started to go up and up.

Back then, I didn't think much about crypto, if at all - after the ICO and a few years had passed, I nearly almost forgot about it, in fact. (Luckily I wrote down the private keys on paper somewhere so I could restore my wallet. 😅) Thanks to the bull run of 2017, I was able to pay my rent, pay off my student loans, and give me that illusive "savings" thing that I heard so much about from others. It really was a life-changing experience for me, no matter how you put it.

An experience like that will make you a believer, for sure - especially since most of my other career options up until that point either didn't pay enough or were met with glass ceilings and dead-ends. (We live in a world of contractors now, where loyalty is valued very little, if at all unfortunately.) If it could help me, it could help others too, I figured - that's when it turned from a curious hobby into a mission - a way of life, really.

I know I'm not alone in this journey, but in crypto, the paths are rarely smooth. Fast forward to today, I've invested in many other crypto projects since then - I made good returns in some, lost money in others. I don't day trade, so all of my investments are either dollar-cost averaged or for long-term HODLing - but I did notice a very distinctive, consistent pattern: the more "authentic" a community was behind the project, the more likely they were to generate a massive return in the long run.

Out of everything in my portfolio, Dogecoin ($DOGE) was by far, the highest earning one so far. I got in before the massive "jump" in 2021 so my returns were something like 110,230%...I don't know, I just stopped counting after a while, honestly. (For the record: ETH I got in around 32 cents per and I bought my first CryptoPunk at around ~$100, which you can check for yourself. [It's in cold storage now for safekeeping, FYI.])

I don't usually repeat this stuff too much since it sounds like bragging and I don't like the type of attention that sort of thing brings, but for this article I figure it was important to show what worked and didn't work for me because the way these things happen isn't what most people think. (If they did, everyone would be rich by now, wouldn't they?) People may agree or disagree with my opinions, but I think it's important that I at least put my perspective out there so they know where I'm coming from.

The reason why I chose to talk about Dogecoin is because it's a good example of the main point I'm trying to illustrate here, because it touches on a lot of things which will segway nicely into Teia and the current NFT marketplace as it exists today. When I got into Dogecoin around 2017-2018, this is how I rationalized it:

Making Money with What Money Can't Buy

• The Dogecoin community was active, met regularly (both IRL and online) and were working on their product in good faith - it was obvious that they cared about the project a LOT.
• The community was there because they wanted to be there, not because of short-term gains, which they were famously dismissive of - people were willingly putting in their own time and resources into the project to keep it afloat.
• The Dogecoin community had the reputation for having the nicest people around. (Still mostly true.)
• Community members were using their own products for their own use - they had their own feedback loop going that helped their project improve over time.
• They were producing cultural artifacts - otherwise known as "memes" - that propagated their cause in an organic way. (Proof-of-Community - one of NFTs' biggest use-case.)
• They were largely considered a "joke" in the industry at the time (mostly because of market valuations) - but they owned and ran with it. This is actually a good thing because it keeps the prices down while also maintaining momentum for the long-term. (It's worth noting that the general public did not care about this issue either way - this was a battle inside of a very small pond.)
• They were having a lot of fun , in some pretty obvious ways. Dogecon and Doge meetup events were some of the highlights of that era that people still talk about to this day.

At our company M1X Labs, our unofficial motto is "fun is one of our KPIs" - because we really do believe that keeping morale high is the best thing you can do to keep an interest in an idea going. Whether we like it or not, startups are stressful and crypto ecosystems are going to take a while to evolve anyway - might as well be having fun, right? It's not the moment in the spotlight that matters - it's what you're doing when no-one is looking that makes the difference in the end.

Of course, I can see the cynics rolling their eyes already - hard work and good deeds get rewarded in this world we live in? How naïve. And what good is fun if you have no money and no glory? Well, there's something to the idea of having to eat and pay the bills too, but there is a sort of "necessary optimism" you need to have if you're going for these sorts of high-risk, high-reward bets. If you truly can't see the potential for certain ideas to leap-frog out of existing situations, this type of investment strategy probably isn't for you.

Good intentions alone is not enough to guarantee success, this is true. But as someone who also had product management training, it was obvious to me even back then that the Dogecoin community also had all the fundamentals of good product building too - the "build-test-feedback" loop that even well-established tech projects often ignore. The virtuous cycle is already there, and at bargain prices - why would you NOT get in, really?

Perhaps it's better to illustrate it as an inversion of the previous list - which, unfortunately, is also the story of Dogecoin's downfall:

Losing Money with What Money Can Buy

• Due to the handiwork of a certain grifter-in-chief (who shall go unnamed) and the price having jumped so much, the ecosystem got flooded with speculators wanting to get in, largely for reasons of greed. (It leaped 100000% in a few days, certainly, it will happen again??!?) The scene got flooded with talkers rather than builders, copycat projects, and social toxicity which just added a lot more noise and muddled the product-building process.
• Because DOGE was originally a fork of Bitcoin/Litecoin/🐶/Luckycoin/whatever, it did not natively support NFTs. NFTs and the meme-building community that DOGE had seemed like a natural fit and there were talks about doing something about that. Unfortunately because the ecosystem was taken over by speculators at that point the idea never went anywhere. (These proposals are still stalled right now, as far as I know - it is actually very difficult to modify the protocol to do things it wasn't meant for.)
• As institutional money starting coming in, the disconnect between the monied interests vs the happenings on the ground begin to widen. Dogecoin's original wallet app was simple but it had great UI and most importantly, it worked - it had a great starting point to build more interesting things on top of. But it never got past that stage because people couldn't agree on what needed to be done next. (Institutional money added demands and layers of friction to the community that eventually became untenable.)
• After a few people got rich off of DOGE's hype, the "underdog" story started to get watered-down, making it less believable. This eroded morale even further. The party was basically over after the phrase "Dogecoin Millionaire" became a thing.
• Due to the pandemic, IRL events stopped happening everywhere, which meant that all of the social interactions that were happening on the chain were either online or on social media. The face-to-face interactions that added depth to the project's social layers were no longer there.
• It became obvious over time that people weren't having fun anymore and were mostly there just for the "money". The "money" is in quotes, because most people who joined DOGE after the hype have lost significant amounts of money and is mostly just looking to break even at this point. No money + no fun is a bad combination that is untenable in any situation, really. (I sold off most of mine to fund a creative project a few years ago, to be transparent about it.)

As far as the "migration patterns of artists and builders on Web3" goes, I've seen similar things happen to Bitcoin and Ethereum as well - crypto artists used to all be interested in Bitcoin when it first started (the only game in town), flocked to Ethereum (smart contracts) and Dogecoin (the fun, social crypto) later on, which included people like myself. By now, most of the builders and artists that used to be in ETH/DOGE have already moved onto other places - some back to BTC hoping for reform, or to other L2s and alts in order to apply their creative talents directly.

The crypto industry is still in its early stages so it's still anyone's game, really. But in its current state, speculators have largely taken over the big "brand name" coins, just because of its popularity. (The proof is in the fees, which are still untenably high in BTC/ETH. And there are forces out there now who want to keep things that way so "doing the right thing" may never happen.) The "life cycle" of a crypto project often follows this arc:

• Someone or a team of people comes up with a novel, useful idea around crypto. They work very hard to launch a prototype or proof-of-concept to show the world what they have.
• A passionate early-adopter community forms around the project, taking the project from 0 to 1. (Price goes up!)
• Word gets around about the project, and talent start flocking to it, intrigued by its potential. (The "good times".)
• Word gets around about the project even more - while the community is still small, smart investors see the potential and put in some resources to the cause. (Price goes up!)
• Word gets around that the price went up - or alternatively, the project gets marketed heavily to get as many people into the project as possible. The speculators have arrived. (Price goes up!)
• Big name brands, celebrities and famous people, the media, copycat projects, etc. all get caught in the frenzy. Secondary markets start to emerge. Everyone is talking about it, all the time. (Price goes up! Sort of.)
• Speculators start dominating the conversation around the project, while the needs of builders and artists become secondary. The markets start to cannibalize each other, people get into the scarcity mindset, internal battles start to become more frequent. Now that the fun is gone, the creative people leave the space, looking for something better. (Price wobbles up and down - this is where the smart investors start pulling out.)
• At some point, people collectively realize that the project itself hasn't made any progress in a long time - and the bubble pops. The markets start tanking. (Price goes down, obviously.)
• Speculators are talking amongst each other, trying to do "damage control". But at that point the people who actually know how the product works are no longer there. The project either dies or goes on life-support from external sources - a zombified version of its original self. (Not quite alive, but not quite dead, either. 🧟)
• Having lost its way, the project eventually gives up on the idea of utility and becomes a game of politics instead of product. (Assuming that it hasn't been abandoned completely at that point.)

This is a common pattern you see in traditional startups too - crypto is not that much different from them in regard to the fundamentals. Is there money to be made in crypto projects that have become "politicized"? Sure - given the instability of the fiat/financial markets right now, there's a chance that the crypto ecosystem itself might get a massive boost from outside investments in the near future. But at that point it becomes a different game - one that is arguably much harder to predict than a product-based one because it runs purely on people's feelings, rather than merit or utility. And that outcome would be more of a criticism of fiat rather than a praise of crypto, really. Crypto is still waiting for its "breakout" moment where it's able to harness the power of speculator money without losing its vision entirely - so far, it hasn't proven to be that resilient, just yet. (Maybe one day, though - having to jump ship every time things go sour is not that fun for investors, either.)

After having witnessed several cycles of this stuff, I'll have to say that the cheesy slogan of hard work, authenticity, and patience pays off in the long-run is actually very true. The investments I've stuck to with these principles have done me well, the ones that didn't...well, didn't. The one good thing about crypto is that the chances of good work being rewarded and bad work being punished in the marketplace is actually much higher than in fiat right now, where politics and protectionism can distort the marketplace in ways that is hard to detect.

With a lot going on in a lot places all at once, it can be difficult to assess how projects are doing in every detail - a lot of investment decisions are based on gut feelings, since there isn't enough time in the day to check under every rock. So...finally going to the title of this article, what is my gut telling me about NFTs right now? Teia is the future of NFTs - there is no question in my mind at this point. So we'll now transition into talking about why Teia is the next sleeper project in Tezos...and probably the NFT ecosystem as a whole.

Teia is the "Level Playing Field" in NFT Markets We Have Been Waiting For

In a previous article I already made a few points about the potential of Teia being the next big thing in NFTs - but I'll elaborate here further. A quick list of reasons, which might sound like a familiar theme:

• The Teia community is active, meets regularly (both IRL and online) and are working on their products in good faith - it's obvious that they care about the project a LOT.
• The community is there because they want to be there, not because of short-term gains, which they are famously dismissive of (they purposely turned off marketplace fees over this past year because it wasn't "proper") - people are willingly putting in their own time and resources into the project to keep it afloat.
• The Teia community has the reputation for having the nicest people around. (Still true. 😁)
• Community members are using their own products for their own use - they have their own feedback loop going that helped their project improve over time.
• They are producing cultural artifacts - otherwise known as "art" - that propagates their cause in an organic way. (Proof-of-Community - one of NFTs' biggest use-case.)
• They are largely considered a "joke" in the industry right now (mostly because of market valuations) - but they own and run with it. This is actually a good thing because it keeps the prices down if you're trying to get in. (It's worth noting that the general public does not care about this issue either way - this is a battle inside of a very small pond.)
• They are having a lot of fun , in some pretty obvious ways. The story of Hic et Nunc's evolution to Teia is still one of the most interesting stories in the crypto space which continues to provide meaning to the community and members as a whole.

And the 𝄌Coda, which makes Teia even more appealing:

• There is a soft consensus (even among supporters of other chains) that the art on Tezos is of the highest quality in Web3 right now. The chain needs to do what it can to retain this talent to maintain its reputation, but they are in the lead - at least for now. (See: #SwapOnTeia)
• People who pay attention to these topics know that the NFT community on Tezos started with Hic et Nunc, which Teia is a direct off-shoot of. Building a community from scratch is very difficult and is something a lot of tech projects struggle with, but in this case the community is already pre-existing.
• Because the people building and maintaining the tools are also artists themselves, their feature releases have real utility, and is usually on point. (Teia raising their upload limit to 2GB recently is a good example - this allows filmmakers and video artists to upload their works in a reasonable manner. Currently this is very difficult to do elsewhere.)
• Teia is verifiably decentralized - even in its early form. Given how small it is right now it might not seem like that big of a deal, but these initial setups are important because it sets the tone for things to come. (Plans for token dilution in order to open it up to the broader community is already in the works.) Put another way, centralized projects that claim they'll decentralize "later on" are basically stringing people along because they will never get around to it. (It's much easier to scale what is already being done now than trying to do a hard pivot later on, with entrenched interests involved. In this space, small successes can often be the mark-of-death.)
• Teia is putting the hard work of manually policing copyminting, bots, and spam - which is the secret to the high quality of their feeds. (Most other places get lazy with this and usually end up with a lot of noise.) Telling the difference between art and spam is an underappreciated skill (it's a lot harder than you think) that only Teia is applying effectively right now, I would argue.
• The NFT ecosystem is in need of standards around copyright, intellectual property, storage methods, gateway/IPFS issues, compression standards, etc. etc. which most places haven't even begun to think about yet. Private companies have a tendency to set their own standards and try to monopolize the market itself, but this approach is not ideal because it adds significant systemic risk while also discouraging competition in the market itself. Teia - being a non-profit decentralized DAO - is perfectly positioned to be the entity that set these standards, since it's not trying to represent the special interests of one particular company.

If you've been following Teia's blog, it's been a long road getting here and progress probably hasn't been as fast as people would have liked (we feel the same way, too, honestly), but the intention was always to do things the right way, even if it takes a little longer. So the result of that patience was the non-profit DAO - a result of a year's worth of work - which will allow the organization to grow at a slow and steady pace that is both reliable and predictable. Smart investors know that small and functional > big and dysfunctional in the end, especially if you're trying to maximize your returns.

Interested in "getting in"? Well, there was no "Teia ICO" or token sale - the DAO tokens are designed to be for voting only and there are no plans to cater to speculation sales in this way. That's part of the beauty of it - if you're interested in "mooning" off of Teia, I'd suggest just buying some XTZ as an aggregate or better yet, take a chance on buying NFTs directly from artists themselves. Another way to get involved is to build secondary markets around the ecosystem (as we are doing with M1X Labs right now) and position yourself later for the potential of future growth.

I'd say that most of the artists on Teia are the "true artist" type - they create not because they want to, but because they have to. It is part of their life-blood - their existence, in it of itself. There is nothing more consistent than that, really. Even with the markets down, if this mindset is there an ecosystem will never die - how even Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin made it through the last few winters even when nobody was talking about them at the time. Most of the respect should go to the artists and builders who were working diligently during these times, really, even if most of them probably will never get the credit they deserve.

This article can maybe serve as a "when to get in, when to get out" type of guide if you're so inclined - smart investors know when to pull out of a project about to go into decline - that's how they make their money, even if things don't pan out the way they originally planned. But as said earlier, jumping ship all the time is no fun either - what I really want is for someone to figure all this stuff out so I can get paid...not as an investor, but as a musician just trying to make a living off of my work.

The crypto/web3 ecosystems aren't quite there yet, but we are getting closer every day and I do believe that one day it will actually happen. And how does that happen? Authenticity. It is really the only way it'll happen, as far as I'm concerned.