I'll start with a personal note. We finally decided to share some stuff publicly. Next week, perhaps. It's a small NSFW collection of art (with some exciting caveats) we've been developing as a part of a poetic web longread – the project that started way before February 2022. After some deliberations, we're ready to simply drop it and see what happens. Perhaps not a wise business decision, but we waited long enough. It's also sort of a positive thinking type of move for the entire team to experience: this project sat way too long in our back pocket while we waited a lot for a perfect storm. For sure, this thing is less convenient than ever, but we want to dot the i's and cross the t's with this one – and move on. 

With this out of the way, I've been thinking a lot recently about the way our small team optimistically turned to web3 back at the beginning of ‘22. Like, was it even the right way to do it? In December-January, there was still so much hype around the NFT, new ATH's were on our monitors, and Meta had just announced its plans (which sounded almost like a pop-culture recognition). And although the signs of the inevitable fallout were already quite visible, for many small collectives of artists, none of the economic and political indicators mattered.  

Many small teams started developing around the same time as we were. We've positioned ourselves at the frontier of digital transformation as we discovered more and more ways to integrate our ideas and work into an exciting web3 arena. The subsequent downslide of the NFT market turned out to be an experience worth living through, especially for ever-mentally wounded artists and creatives. The web3 celebration in under-the-radar creative circles went silent for a while, leaving the naive and hopeless with many projects stuck in development hell. Our team got lucky too. 

Likewise, we went for hype, hoping that with the right attitude, the web3 community would appreciate anything we'll be able to produce. It turned out NFT was not an instant problem-solver for everything related to artists' long-term economic well-being. That's the reality that many creators got into, including us. However, this experience's bright side resulted in the opportunity for numerous teams to take time and figure out what matters in this web3 transition. We recently walked through the same thought process inside our team, and I will share our conclusions next time.