I've been cooking something on the simmer for like 9 years lol, time to talk about it. I started my aerospace company in my early 20s. Noob as hell. My dad just retired from managing a big 4 accounting firm and became my CFO. Together we carved out a niche: power generation for commercial aviation. FAA accredited. Built something real from nothing. In 2017, I was playing around with mining and started uploading our parts paperwork onto Bitcoin. Not trying to make money, just trying to prove the documents existed. If someone downstream edited my traceability docs, at least the chain would show it wasn't me. COVID hit in 2020 and aviation ground to a halt. That July, my father and partner died of the virus. I walked out of the company we built and didn't come back for a long time. I had a crypto balance sheet I was mostly passive about and nothing but time to spend on twitter, monitoring the situation. DeFi summer and NFT season felt like everything my 2017 Bitcoin anchoring tried to solve. I'd also been collecting generative art since before tokens were a thing, so the onchain certificates were actually better than the paper ones I’ve once lost (sorry Tyler). I learned more about provenance from 6529 and partners than from a decade in aviation. That's not a knock on aviation, NFTs are simply the Michael Jordan of asset tracking. For 5 years I witnessed, purchased, and admired some of the best NFTs and artworks ever conceived. Each token had perfect custody, while $10 million aircraft engines ship with paper certificates and records that can be easy to forge. I love NFTs and yet it killed me that machines of wonder like aeroplanes had worse provenance than a cryptodickbutt. Months ago I told @bonafidehan I hate watching an industry I love sit decades in the past. Han called me back in 2 minutes with a plan. That plan became Athena, and the team at Shape went all in. We've since shipped Athena on aircraft parts and are running a pilot with some of the largest operators in the industry. I’d love to share more but I know we have much work ahead and much to fill you in on as we scale. Follow us along for the ride @AthenaResearch.