People keep talking about how to bring NFTs back.
But I think most people forget what made them matter in the first place.
It wasn’t just the art.
It wasn’t just the tech.
It was that, for a short window of time, people actually came together.
Artists, traders, devs, collectors… everyone was pushing in the same direction.
Not perfectly, not selflessly, but together.
There was this shared belief that we could build a new kind of system.
One that rewarded participation, creativity, and effort.
One where the value didn’t just move up, it moved around.
Over time, that started to fade.
The systems that kept things balanced started breaking.
Royalties got stripped. Incentives got warped.
Everything became hyper-financialized.
And the connection that held it all together started to thin out.
Let’s be honest, the world’s more divided than ever.
Politics, demographics, religion, race, everything pits people against each other.
Tale as old as time: divide and conquer.
But for the first time, we actually have the tools to do the opposite.
To connect, to organize, to build together and win together. To use open systems to coordinate instead of compete.
Most people don’t even realize how powerful that is.
They’ve already checked out and stopped believing they’ll ever own anything or get ahead.
Everything feels rigged, like the walls are closing in.
But if we can find alignment again — even in small ways — it changes everything.
Because when people see what’s possible when they work together, it shifts their entire sense of what they’re capable of.
Back it 2021/2022 it wasn’t only about making the most money, it was about what we could build or achieve with the money. That freedom to imagine the possibilities as all but disappeared from most ecosystems.
This is a little quote I love: Two people can meet and exchange a dollar and both leave with one dollar.
But if they meet and exchange an idea, they both leave with two ideas.
That’s the point. That’s the part worth fighting to bring back.
What cemented me here wasn’t just the market or the tech, it was realizing how powerful it is when people actually come together.
For once, it didn’t matter where you were from, what you believed, or what side you were on.
None of that red vs blue, black vs white, us vs them bullshit.
It was just people moving in the same direction — building, creating, experimenting.
And you could feel it.
When enough people align around something, it shifts reality. You start to see how much of the world’s division is manufactured and how much energy we waste fighting each other instead of realizing what we could do if we worked together.
That’s what locked me into this space.
It was a glimpse of what collective power actually looks like.
And now, a few years later, we finally have the guardrails and the architecture to make that real.
The question isn’t when NFTs come back....
It’s whether we ever will.