Building journeys and experiences - Blockchain onboarding resources coming soon 🐧 a collector and an art/tech/product/marketing/data/design/music nerd 🎷
some thoughts about opensea defaulting nfts to USD prices, from my point of view which is probably different compared to most collectors:
when we started exploring ordinals 3 years ago, one of the things we loved about them is that they’d force people to use BTC to buy them. and it worked! thousands of collectors got BTC for the first time just to participate in ordinals. that’s awesome. and i imagine may ethereum collectors feel the same way.
BUT in retrospect i actually don’t think this was good for ordinals. people don’t want to spend their BTC. that’s a very real thing. if people could connect their existing wallets with USDC on solana or base, and use that to buy ordinals directly, ordinals would be more liquid. i’m sure of that.
requiring that people use BTC only, and on a specific ordinals wallet, kills the psychology of buying something. it goes from a potential impulse buy, to a long and excruciating process of acquiring new bitcoin or transferring existing bitcoin (from cold storage??), with very slow transaction times, just to be able to press the buy button in the first place (and then wait a long time again for confirmation)
if you want people to actually buy something, you don’t FORCE them to go through that process. you should let the do that if they want to, but you should give them choice. and most will choose USDC.
now, some will say that with ETH or SOL it’s not as bad. people are more willing to spend ETH/SOL than BTC, and more people are already set up to do so, and even if they aren’t, it’s much quicker to get set up to spend ETH/SOL than it is with BTC. those things are all true.
but the friction is still there even if it’s not as bad. when someone holds ETH or SOL in 2025 it’s because they want ETH/SOL exposure. if they spend some ETH out of their ETH position, they now need to replace it to maintain that exposure. it’s true that some OGs don’t think that way (because the have more ETH than they know what to do with), but most newcomers do view their holdings as a position they wish to maintain. it’s easier for them to just spend dollars on nfts, if they’d buy nfts at all
and this isn’t unique to nfts. go back in time to 2015: all altcoins were priced in BTC. on most early CEXs if you wanted to buy ETH you’d see its price denominated in BTC and you had to get bitcoin first to trade it. but this isn’t convenient and limits the reach of altcoins so eventually they stopped doing that
same goes for memecoins on solana: everyone used to hold SOL balances to trade memes directly but increasingly people don’t do that. internally, the liquidity pools for most memes are paired against SOL and have an internal price denominated in SOL. but almost nobody tracks the price of fartcoin against SOL. the only chart that matters is fart/usd. and tools like moonshot and fomo popularized trading memes with a USDC balance. that’s what people want.
another issue with denominating nfts in BTC/ETH/SOL was that it created a false expectation that nfts would outperform BTC/ETH/SOL always. that might be the case for some nfts on some timeframes but expecting that it’ll always happen isn’t realistic. that’s not what people expect with altcoins for example. they know sometimes they’ll outperform btc and sometimes they won’t. denominating in dollars will imo readjust people’s brains over time to evaluate their nft purchases independently and to stop assuming that their nfts are “leveraged eth”, which they really aren’t
tldr thanks for coming to my ted talk, i think it’s very natural to price nfts in dollars, i’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. after all, any other crypto asset on any chain has switched to being priced in dollars years ago. it just makes sense
people are upset right now, maybe because it makes their nfts look overvalued. maybe they are overvalued… but anyways after the dust settles, i think by the end of next year everyone will agree that this was an obviously good decision.
btc to $400k btw
Today marks one year since we released Machine In The Ghost by @0xdiid.
Machine In The Ghost is a generative art collection that reimagines historical masterpieces through a custom on-chain dithering algorithm. Sourced from museum archives, each work appropriates the original into something refreshingly new.
To celebrate this collection, together we're running a special anniversary contest.
How to enter:
• Use the algorithmic generator (https://t.co/T5mY0p8x27)
• Quote Tweet this post with your favorite curated output and hash (string of letters and numbers below image).
@0xdiid, @stephensantoro_, and @backseats_eth will each select 1 artwork to be cemented in the collection forever.
@peanutt@MicroM43@LongLostNFT Sure I'll reach out soon and we can find time, just need to work through one unexpected thing that recently came up for it first
@clairekart I've written parts of sentences where I'm proud of the final version, but it only works since most copy is there and AI is being used subtly to convey a specific feeling
Good for tweaks or brainstorming, but heavier use in the final product can quickly lose authenticity
As video games became realistic it became clear that visual quality ≠ a good or enjoyable game
Feels like how AI is being used its speed running this same thought process throughout many industries. Using words to create only gets you so far towards quality
It's sad how these days nearly everyone opts for shortcuts instead of trying to understand how things work and how to do new things
Feels like much of it is pressure from not having much free time but just being willing to sit down, learn, and try puts you ahead of 98% of people
This happens every few years. Eventually either ppl get fed up by continuously high prices, or a set gets printed into the ground which makes a lot of sellers and collectors lose money on the set. Then attention shifts, prices start going down, scalpers panic, prices continue down, everything slowly becomes available but ppl who wanted packs for months suddenly aren't interested, and it's a buyers market again with everything available
@FFVV1211 A large % of crypto enthusiasts back then didn't use twitter (reddit was more popular), and main character syndrome didn't exist like now
More ideas floating around, less ppl there solely for money which led to more genuine conversations, and things moved much slower. Good times
I've built many onboarding journeys in the past and have been working on a crypto onboarding resource for a while. The biggest challenge is getting the content where it can be understood and used by the most ppl
Which concepts to include really depends on the goals of who you're talking to; tech curious ppl who just want to learn more vs those who want to learn more and also want to know how to use it vs those who just want to do something specific with crypto
To provide a more meta recommendation I recommend an intro/beginner path including how to use basic tools, and an advanced path for the more nitty gritty topics. If you want the most ppl to understand crypto you will want a way to get them from 0 to 1 on basic concepts first, then provide a way for them to dive deeper on more technical concepts. It will be impossible to layer all info into a first pass due to how much is involved in crypto (too much to teach/learn), so a basic outline and descriptions before exposing ppl to more nitty gritty details is key
Feel free to dm if ya want to chat about anything