Cybernetic panda supremacy 🦾
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Someone borrowed $250K using a Zombie CryptoPunk NFT as collateral, and the entire transaction was completed in less than 5 minutes.
Compare that to traditional banking, where loan processing can take days or even weeks.
This is the kind of value NFTs and onchain technology can provide when given a real chance.
NFTs as a store of value make a lot more sense when you look beyond the art and speculation and start looking at their financial utility.
Introducing NOVITÁ: An Onchain TekTok.
A series exploring onchain technology and other emerging technologies that are building useful things for the real world.
The focus is simple: working technology, real utility, and products worth paying attention to. Not speculation, empty promises, or technology looking for a problem to solve.
I’ll be breaking down interesting projects, how their technology works, the problems they solve, and their potential beyond the crypto bubble.
The goal is to look beyond the noise and pay attention to what’s actually being built.
Episode 1 coming next.
One of the biggest misunderstandings in NFTs is the relationship between a collection’s success and the financial returns its holders should expect.
We’ve seen this conversation around collections like Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and others. As these projects expand beyond Web3, some holders feel neglected because the team is focused on building a broader brand rather than making the NFT collection the center of its strategy.
But I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to own art, a collectible, a token, or a stock.
These are different assets, and they don’t derive their value in the same way.
1. Why would anyone hold art for the long term?
People collect art for different reasons.
Some appreciate the artistic value. Others want to own a piece of cultural history, support an artist they believe in, express their identity, or possess something scarce that they believe others will value in the future.
The financial return is only one possible outcome.
Think about collecting Pokémon cards, Marvel collectibles, or original artwork. A franchise can generate billions in revenue without every collectible associated with it increasing in value.
The franchise’s success might bring more attention to the collectibles, but the value of each item still depends on factors such as demand, rarity, cultural relevance, condition, and what collectors are willing to pay.
NFT art works in a similar way.
If a collection becomes culturally relevant, more people might want to own its NFTs. That can increase demand and prices. But the brand becoming more successful doesn’t automatically create demand for every NFT in the collection.
A successful brand can make an NFT collection more desirable, but it cannot guarantee that its NFTs will appreciate.
This is why long term art collecting requires a different mindset from investing in a business. You need to understand what makes the artwork desirable in its own right, why people might continue to care about it, and whether future collectors will want to own it.
2. The stock market has a different relationship with revenue
In traditional markets, investors can buy shares in a company and gain an ownership claim on that business.
When a company grows its earnings, investors may value it more highly because they expect stronger future cash flows, dividends, or other economic benefits. Revenue alone doesn’t guarantee a higher stock price, but the relationship between business performance and shareholder value is established.
Crypto tokens work differently.
A project can generate millions in revenue without that revenue accruing to its token holders. The token needs a credible economic mechanism connecting the success of the business to the asset.
That mechanism could include revenue-funded buybacks, token burns, distributions where legally and structurally appropriate, or another clearly defined source of demand or value.
Without such a mechanism, buying a token because you believe the company behind it will succeed can be a flawed investment thesis.
You might be right about the company and still be wrong about the token.
NFTs introduce another layer of separation.
Owning an NFT does not automatically give you equity in the company, a share of its revenue, or a perpetual claim on the value of the brand.
Unless the terms explicitly provide otherwise, you could own a collectible associated with a successful business without receiving any of that business’s financial upside.
You can correctly predict a brand’s success and still lose money holding its NFT.
3. The Pudgy Penguins and Azuki conversation
Consider a project that starts as an NFT collection and eventually wants to become a mainstream consumer brand.
The founders might prioritize toys, games, entertainment, retail partnerships, and audiences who have never used a crypto wallet.
From a business perspective, this could be the right strategy. The team is trying to make its intellectual property relevant to a much larger audience.
But the NFT holder might have bought into a different vision: a thriving Web3 community in which the collection remains central and its success translates into a higher NFT floor price.
These two expectations can conflict.
Pudgy Penguins is an interesting case because it has pursued physical products and mainstream distribution while also creating licensing opportunities for holders. Its official licensing materials describe opportunities for holders to license their individual penguins for product and content initiatives.
Azuki raises a related question about how prominently a project presents its NFT origins as it develops its broader brand and entertainment ambitions.
The important distinction is that building a successful consumer brand and building financial value for NFT holders are separate objectives unless the business deliberately connects them.
A project can succeed at the first while disappointing holders who expected the second.
We should also be careful not to treat every expansion beyond Web3 as evidence that founders are exploiting their communities. A broader audience can benefit a collection by increasing its cultural relevance. The real question is whether holders have a clearly defined way to participate in that success, beyond hoping the floor price rises.
4. Are founders using Web3 communities to fund businesses outside Web3?
The answer is both yes and no.
NFT collections can give founders access to capital, early customers, distribution, attention, and a community willing to support an unproven idea.
The community takes a risk on the possibility that the project will become something much bigger.
That arrangement can be mutually beneficial. Early supporters might receive a collectible that appreciates, access to experiences, commercial rights, or other benefits. Founders receive the resources and attention needed to build the business.
But the incentives are not always aligned.
A founder may see the NFT collection as the starting point for a much larger company. A holder may see the company as a way to make the NFT more valuable.
Both can believe in the same project while expecting entirely different outcomes.
This is where holders need to understand the game they are playing.
Are you buying art you genuinely want to own? Are you speculating on attention? Are you betting on a future consumer brand? Or are you assuming that business revenue will somehow flow back to your NFT?
These are different investment thesis, and each requires different evidence.
If your thesis depends on a financial relationship that the project has never promised, you are taking a risk based on your own expectations rather than an enforceable entitlement.
5. Perhaps the problem is the ownership model itself
This brings me to a more interesting question: what if NFTs evolved to give holders a more active role in the commercial success of the intellectual property they own?
Imagine buying an NFT of a character and receiving clearly defined, transferable commercial rights to that character.
You could use it to create videos, build a social media personality, produce merchandise, develop a game, or license it to a business that wants to use the character in its products.
If the character becomes popular, you could benefit from the demand you helped create.
The collection would no longer depend entirely on the founding team to generate attention and create value. Every holder could become a potential contributor to the brand’s growth.
Some holders might make content. Others might build physical products, develop games, or negotiate licensing deals. The strongest characters could develop their own audiences and businesses.
The collection would become an ecosystem of independently operated IP rather than a group of people waiting for a central team to deliver value.
There is an important distinction here: buying an NFT does not automatically transfer copyright or commercial rights. Those rights need to be explicitly granted through the applicable license or legal agreement.
But that is exactly why the ownership model matters.
6. What if holders could turn their characters into businesses?
Imagine a collection of 10,000 unique characters.
Under the conventional model, holders buy the characters, trade them, use them as profile pictures, and wait for the founding team to make the collection more valuable.
Under a more developed ownership model, each character could have its own commercial life.
One holder could turn their character into a successful YouTube personality. Another could create a clothing brand. Someone else could use theirs in a game or license it for a physical collectible.
The creator of the character could earn money from their work, while the broader collection benefits from increased attention and cultural relevance.
The NFT would represent a transferable set of rights to that particular character, as defined by its license. When the NFT changes hands, the associated rights would transfer according to those terms.
This could also create a stronger reason to hold an NFT long-term. You would not simply be holding an asset and hoping someone else makes it more valuable. You would own something you could actively develop, commercialize, or license.
There would still be no guarantee of financial success. Most characters and businesses would not become popular, and holders would need to respect the collection’s licensing terms, trademarks, and other applicable rights.
But at least the path to creating value would be more tangible.
7. The future of NFTs should not be limited to floor prices
I think Web3 needs to rethink how it approaches NFT ownership.
Not every collection needs to distribute revenue. Not every NFT needs commercial utility. Art should be allowed to exist as art, and collectors should be free to collect without expecting a financial return.
But when a collection is marketed around intellectual property, commercial opportunities, and the ambition to become a global brand, the relationship between the brand and its holders deserves much more thought.
If the long-term vision is to create valuable characters and intellectual property, why should all commercial opportunities depend on the founding team?
Why can’t holders build businesses around the assets they own? Why can’t a character’s success come from the community as well as the core team? And why shouldn’t those rights be clearly defined from the beginning?
The goal should not be to force every NFT into a financial instrument. It should be to give collectors a clearer understanding of what they own and, where appropriate, the tools to create value from it.
Lots of you are getting so caught up in memecoin gambling that you’ve started acting like it’s the only way to make money in crypto.
You’ve forgotten that crypto is an entire industry with multiple niches you can learn, build in, and profit from.
I see crypto as a form of leverage on other industries. As a writer, crypto gives you an opportunity to build an audience, monetize your knowledge, and earn from a niche that values your expertise.
As an analyst, you can specialize in crypto, build a reputation for your research, and monetize insights that people are willing to pay for.
The same applies to artists, developers, designers, creators, streamers, marketers, and many others.
Crypto can give these skills access to global audiences, new business models, tokenized communities, and financial opportunities that might be harder to access in traditional industries.
Look at what’s happening outside crypto today. The creator economy is growing, businesses are investing more in creators, and professionals are finding new ways to monetize their skills independently. The opportunity is no longer limited to getting a job; it’s increasingly about building an audience, developing expertise, and creating something people value.
Crypto offers another layer to that opportunity.
Of course, none of this guarantees instant money. It takes time to build credibility, develop a skill, attract an audience, and earn a reputation. But the upside can be significantly greater when you combine a valuable skill with an industry that rewards early participation and global distribution.
This is why I sometimes feel like people losing money to ruggers is a necessary wake-up call.
Not because I enjoy seeing people lose their money, but because the market needs to learn that crypto is not a get rich quick scheme.
You can spend years jumping from one memecoin to another, hoping to catch the next 100x, or you can spend those years developing a skill, building a reputation, and positioning yourself in an industry that’s still evolving.
One approach depends heavily on timing and speculation. The other gives you something you can build on, even when the market is down.
Crypto is bigger than gambling. Stop treating it like a casino when it can also be an industry where you build a career, a business, and long-term wealth.
For how long are we going to pretend the current token standards are good enough?
The entire crypto market is still an experiment. Yet, somewhere along the way, we became so distracted by the money that we stopped asking the more important question: What is this technology supposed to offer the world?
We have spent years experimenting with permissionless token creation and trading. We’ve seen what works, but we’ve also seen the flaws that emerge when these systems operate at scale.
PvP trading, bundled launches, predatory bots, rug pulls, and unfair market advantages have become familiar features of the market. The problem isn’t simply that people lose money. It’s that the infrastructure and incentives often make it easier to exploit participants than to build something valuable for them.
To be clear, not all these problems originate from the token standard itself. Some stem from how tokens are launched, how transactions are ordered, how liquidity is managed, and how trading platforms reward certain behaviours. But that’s precisely why we need to examine the entire system rather than continue treating every problem as an unavoidable part of crypto.
What if we treated these flaws as engineering problems to solve instead of features of a market we have to accept?
Perhaps we need a new token standard, or a new set of protocols built around safer launches, fairer access, greater transparency, and better protection against exploitation. A system where creating a token is still permissionless, but where the infrastructure makes it harder to manipulate markets and profit from unsuspecting participants.
The bigger obstacle might not even be technical. It’s economic.
Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the current system have little incentive to change it. When an ecosystem profits from trading volume, transaction fees, launch activity, and speculation, improving the experience for ordinary users may not always align with its immediate financial interests.
That doesn’t mean every institution deliberately preserves these flaws. It means we should question whether the people benefiting from the current incentives are the right people to rely on to fix them.
Crypto was supposed to give the world new ways to own assets, exchange value, coordinate, and participate in open financial systems. We cannot fulfil that promise if we keep building markets that reward extraction while leaving ordinary users to absorb the consequences.
We’ve tested the current model. We’ve seen its strengths, and we’ve experienced its weaknesses. We shouldn’t confuse the fact that it works technically with the idea that it works well for everyone.
Crypto is still experimental. That should be our reason to improve it, not our excuse for refusing to change it.
We know enough about what works and what doesn’t to start building something better. It’s time for the next evolution of token design.
This has a high probability of onboarding a massive audience to NFTs
Real tek 🐼
I wanted an NFT to feel as normal, to be simple. Ninety-two days later, at 2:06 this morning, the proposal behind it merged into ethereum/ERCs as ERC-8426.
I am writing this like a birthday because that is what it feels like.
For context: ERC numbers run past 8,400 and only 625 have ever been merged. 146 of those reached the finish line. I am not a protocol dev. I am a product guy who has been in NFTs since 2021, and as of this morning my name is on an Ethereum ERC. Draft today. Review next. Final is the target.
What I built, ERC-8426, is the Wallet Pass Extension for NFTs. It lets any token be a native Apple Wallet or Google Wallet pass. The NFT is the pass. Not a picture of it. The card on your phone reads the chain, redraws when the chain changes, pushes to your lock screen, and the buttons on the back fire real on-chain actions. Sell the token and the pass follows the new owner. The old copy goes dead. No dedicated app to install. No browser extension. No seed phrase setup. The wallet is still yours, more on that below. Every normie already has the app. It is called Wallet, and it ships on every iPhone and Android.
I built it because Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are the biggest programmable surface in the world, and this ecosystem barely touches them. Digital ownership is going to be normal for everyone, and the way we do it today is not good enough for anyone. You own something on chain and it lives in a tab, behind an extension, next to a seed phrase you were told never to lose. Nobody carries that around. Everybody carries their phone, and their phone already has a slot for cards that update themselves. The chain should be invisible plumbing and the pass should be the UI. Tickets, memberships, game items, art, tokenized stocks, the deed to a car, your licence. If you can own it on chain, it should live next to your boarding pass and feel like it was always meant to be there.
Tickets, memberships and credentials are already in phone wallets. I want on-chain ownership to feel just as normal. Look around. Your passport is in Apple Wallet. Sixteen states put the driver's licence there. Japan put its national ID there. The EU has to hand every citizen a digital identity wallet by Christmas. Ontario announced its own yesterday. Nasdaq, Robinhood and Coinbase are putting stocks on chain. Everything is getting tokenized and everything is moving into the wallet. The only thing that had no standard way in was the stuff that was born on chain. Now it does.
The standard itself is one small seam: a passURI, a manifest, a change event, an owner check. Lean on purpose. It also writes down how pass links rotate and die, because I shipped that hole in week one and the next builder should not.
Privy made it easier to get a wallet. I want to make it easier to actually use what is inside one. ERC-8426 will do for NFTs what Privy did for wallets. Take the hard part out of the way and let people just use the thing. I built the first version for one game. I opened it up because the next builder should not have to rebuild the same bridge. Someone had to go first. I went.
I was not going to ship a spec with a diagram and a prayer, so we ran it live for a month on Robinhood Chain testnet as WALLETCHI, a pet NFT that is its own wallet pass. You feed it from the card or it dies. A thousand strangers proved it works.
1,000 testnet NFTs. All claimed.
701 saved to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.
11,742 on-chain care actions.
3,574 alerts pushed to lock screens. Nobody downloaded anything.
Under the hood: ERC-7702 smart accounts, ERC-4337 sponsored gas and ERC-6551 token-bound accounts, so a token can hold its own balance and every action from the card lands on chain as its own transaction. Passes signed with an Apple-issued Pass Type certificate and an approved Google Wallet class, not a mock.
Privy handles email onboarding and the embedded wallet, and it is the reason "no seed phrase" is not a trick. It is a real self-custodial wallet. The key is split and only comes together on your device, nobody on our side can move what you own, and you can export the key and walk whenever you want. Smart accounts and sponsored gas keep the blockchain setup out of the way. You sign in, save the pass, and use the thing. Normies get something that just works. Web3 natives get a wallet that is still theirs.
We shipped new features to every live card for a month without an app update or a re-mint. Same pass. That is the whole point of the standard and it kept working.
And we learned a lot. A 24 hour clock that starts at mint kills every mint-and-forget keeper exactly 24 hours later. Android reminders need to hit as hard as iPhone ones. Farms will mint ten pets into one wallet if you let them. Watching people who have never touched crypto play with an on-chain asset from their wallet, without ever realizing there is a blockchain underneath, is still the coolest thing I have ever shipped. Every lesson is already in the next build.
All of it is open, because this is bigger than one project. The spec is CC0 and public. The SDK is MIT and on npm under @ erc8426: contracts, a pass server, Apple and Google delivery, a client, React components and a conformance suite you can point at any contract. Someone on the Magicians thread asked for it one morning and it was on npm that night. There is a live demo on Vercel that tracks the latest release. The reference server and the SDK went through review after review, inside and out, because people are going to put real things in these cards and I want them to be able to trust that.
If you are building a token and you want it living in your holders' wallets, I will personally walk you through it. If you are building a wallet, if you are an exchange, or whatever, my calendar link is at the bottom. I want every builder on this. The more of us ship on it, the faster it becomes the default, and the default is where I am taking it.
None of this happened alone, and writing like this is hard for me, so bear with me.
@abcoathup for handing me the number and telling me straight how editors read. @JochemBrouwer96 for the review that came in at 1 AM and got it merged by 2:06. @dcborthwick for the first real reply on Magicians, which shaped the whole authorization model. @Nexory96 for weeks of security review on the spec, the SDK and the game. @SanLeo461 for encouraging, challenging, and providing his time, then for asking for an SDK in the first place, which is why one exists.
@iamgaurangdesai for introducing me to teams that could help and for believing in this before there was anything to believe in. @segall_max and @privy_io for being so kind and so welcoming to builders, for creating the rails a thousand keepers signed in on, and for making self-custody feel like nothing.
@AnthropicAI and @claudeai, the best pair programmer I have ever had.
@jameshalldon, who told me this could not be done, so I had to go do it. @blkcipher, who got us the certs, stresses about my opsec and processes, and helped keep my infrastructure and concepts rooted in fact, not dreams. @DW3bbs, who I am pretty sure reached out to every person he knew about this ERC and its capabilities, and did everything he could to make this possible.
@pravijn and @lokithebird for being early believers in what this could become, and encouraging me to push forward.
@jo5htheboss for spending hours with me on the phone the last few days, brainstorming, testing, talking shit, hahaha, and to @ChrisJourdan For his kind words, and having me up on his space to tell people what I built!
@BrungusDeluxe, @_offmylawn, @doodlifts and my friends who tested early, minted, broke things, and made this fire.
And LAST BUT NOT LEAST, the 1,000 people who minted on testnet and experienced the proof of concept with me! I LOVE YOU.
A huge thank you to anyone I forgot. If you touched this, you are part of it, and I mean that.
WALLETCHI was the testnet proof. The next release is on mainnet. Everything we learned from this round is going into it. I am proud of what we built here. I am even more excited to show you what comes next. I am locking in. This is the thing I am going to be known for, and I am going to make it undeniable.
The reveal is coming this week, right here. Turn notifications on. I am huntclubhero everywhere and every official link will come from here. Do not click random links and I will never DM you first. (actually i might dm you first lol)
One ask.
Reply with the first thing you would want living in your Wallet, a ticket, an existing nft collection, a membership, a deed, a game item, an experience, anything.
I will tell you whether 8426 can do it today.
Spec: ercs.ethereum.org/ERCS/erc-8…
SDK: github.com/huntclubhero/erc8…
Live demo: erc8426-demo.vercel.app
POC: playwalletchi.com
Magicians thread: ethereum-magicians.org/t/erc…
Walk through it with me: calendly.com/hunt-halldon
One thing I’ve noticed is that crypto lacks storytelling.
For a space that talks about lore more than anything, storytelling seems to be the hardest thing for KOLs to do.
Check the promotional posts for any product. There’s no story, just pure dog shit that gets dismissed as larp.
“BLACK OCTOBER” 🥀
The last 48 hours should remind people that cybersecurity is a problem far bigger than crypto.
Earlier this year, when people predicted that advances in technology could create serious security threats, much of the fear was directed at crypto, its infrastructure, and its ability to protect users.
But look at what’s happening now.
Traditional applications, cloud infrastructure, AI tools, banking systems, and software dependencies are all facing serious security incidents. Some of the attacks were already underway before they became public.
This isn’t a victory lap for crypto. Our industry has its own vulnerabilities, and builders have a responsibility to keep improving security.
But while people are quick to question crypto’s ability to secure the future, builders like Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum’s security researchers are actively working on cryptographic upgrades, including defenses against future quantum threats.
The point is security is an industry wide problem, and crypto technology could be part of the solution.
As innovation accelerates, I believe crypto has the potential to do more than create new financial markets. It could help us build better systems for privacy, digital ownership, verification, and the way we interact with technology.
Don’t just look at crypto for the risks it creates today. Look at the problems its technology could help solve tomorrow.
There has never been a better time to be bullish on Bitcoin than right now.
Traditional stores of value are being tested, and people are beginning to question their ability to preserve scarcity.
Lab-grown diamonds are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from natural ones. Gold faces questions about how reliably its authenticity can be verified. And fiat currencies can be printed whenever monetary authorities decide to expand the supply.
Bitcoin has passed a different kind of test.
Its supply cannot be arbitrarily increased, its scarcity can be independently verified, and its code enforces a maximum supply of 21 million BTC.
The more traditional assets struggle to maintain their perceived scarcity, the stronger Bitcoin’s proposition becomes.
If scarcity is what gives an asset part of its value, then Bitcoin’s greatest advantage is that its scarcity doesn’t depend on anyone’s promise.
It’s that simple.
Y’all get too emotional in this market, and it shows.
You need to accept that the 2021 run is gone and face the reality of the industry we’re in today.
Was 2021 good? Absolutely.
But that doesn’t mean everything happening back then was good. People remember the life changing gains, the communities, and the excitement, while conveniently forgetting the manipulation, rug pulls, and scams that existed alongside them.
According to Chainalysis, crypto scams generated over $7.7B in 2021, with rug pulls accounting for more than $2.8B of that figure.
So let’s stop pretending the old market was some perfect era that we somehow lost.
Every era has its good and bad sides. The incentives just change.
We’re now in an era where social trading, attention, speed, and distribution play a much bigger role in how people trade. You can dislike that reality, but disliking it won’t make it disappear.
The same thing happens in every industry.
Older generations often look back at their time and believe things were better. But nostalgia tends to highlight what people miss while overlooking the problems that existed back then.
Technology changes. Consumer behavior changes. Business models change. New opportunities emerge, and old ones disappear.
Crypto is no different.
Look at the current social-trading meta. Thousands of tokens can launch daily, and attention can move markets in minutes. That creates opportunities for people who understand distribution, market psychology, liquidity, and timing.
It also creates opportunities for scammers, manipulators, and people looking to dump on unsuspecting buyers.
Both realities can exist at the same time.
You don’t have to like every phase of the market, but you do have to understand the phase you’re participating in.
If the current meta doesn’t suit you, there’s nothing wrong with sitting on the sidelines. You don’t need to participate in every trend, and you certainly don’t need to compromise your principles to make money.
But if you choose to participate, understand the incentives, recognize the risks, and find your edge.
Don’t confuse adapting to the market with endorsing everything happening in it.
This phase won’t last forever. New narratives will emerge, new participants will arrive, and the rules of the game will change again.
Pumpfun says it wants to onboard the masses.
But when I look at how it’s trying to achieve that, I have a different question:
Are they onboarding people into crypto, or onboarding more liquidity into a game where the odds are already stacked against them?
Because those are two very different things.
1/12 🧵
The winners post their screenshots.
The losers often disappear.
And the next wave sees the winners, hears the stories and assumes they can reproduce the results.
Meanwhile, every new launch creates another narrative, another chart and another reason to risk capital.
You don’t need to believe every participant is being deliberately exploited to recognize that the structure can repeatedly produce the same outcome.
11/12
My advice is simple:
Protect your liquidity.
Don’t confuse a KOL’s conviction with an edge. Don’t assume a trending token is an opportunity just because everyone is talking about it.
Understand who bought before you, who controls the supply, and who benefits if you keep trading.
And stop treating the trenches as the only path to making it in crypto.
There are other markets, other skills and other opportunities worth your attention.
12/12