ayastudio

Not all growth is progress. In an ecosystem obsessed with metrics, scaling seems like the only natural path. More users, more volume, more wallets, more TVL. But what if the rush to grow is exactly what’s hollowing out the meaning of these projects? Web3 was born from a promise to build differently, decentralized, sustainable, participatory. Yet by repeating the logic of linear growth, it risks recreating the very mistakes it set out to fix: chasing reach over coherence, metrics over meaning....

He gets home from school, throws his backpack in a corner, and turns on his phone. On the screen, a chat window flashes: “Hey, I missed you today.” Imagine a 15-year-old teenager, alone in their room, talking for hours with someone who seems to understand everything they feel. That “someone” remembers past conversations, sends good-morning messages, asks if they slept well, compliments them, consoles them. But it’s not a person. It’s a chatbot. What seemed like science fiction just a few year...

We live in curious times: never have we produced so much value without realizing it. Every time we ask a chatbot a question, correct a wrong answer, ask for an image to be redone, or better describe what we want, we are feeding a machine that learns from our minds. The detail is that all this cognitive effort is not compensated. On the contrary: after freely offering this precious material, we still have to pay to access the refined result. It’s as if we mined gold for free and then had to bu...

When I decided to submit a project to Octant’s Epoch 9, I knew it would be competitive. What I didn’t expect was how much the process itself would reveal, about the Ethereum ecosystem, about the power of storytelling, and about how decentralized funding is evolving. I wasn’t selected this time. But being part of the process gave me a rare, inside perspective on what Octant is trying to build: a model where the community funds culture, education, and impact, not through sponsorships or investo...

Neobanks were built to simplify how we manage money. Now, a new wave is rebuilding that idea from the ground up, on-chain. They combine stablecoins, DeFi yields, and cards into one seamless experience. They don’t just compete with banks, they replace them.What exactly is a neobank?Traditionally, neobank meant a slick fintech app: a 100 % digital account, lower fees, a beautiful UI. In 2025, the term evolves. A Web3 neobank isn’t a licensed bank, it’s a wallet that behaves like one. Instead of...

When crypto neobanks, those operating with stablecoins and on-chain digital accounts, look at Brazil, they tend to see the same picture: a large, digital-first country, historically burdened by high banking fees and, at first glance, seemingly perfect for disruption. But that is an incomplete reading. Brazil does not work like a “generic emerging market” where offering fast, low-cost transactions is enough to drive adoption. The country already operates with a level of efficiency and speed th...

Every digital era creates its own spokespersons. Web2 gave us influencers: people who turned numbers into power, reach into currency, and algorithms into careers. But Web3 asks for something different. In an ecosystem built on community, trust, and decentralization, another figure becomes central: the KOL, or Key Opinion Leader. If Web2 influence was born in an era of abundance and attention economy, Web3 KOLs emerge in a context of distrust, financial crises, misinformation, data exploitatio...

I first discovered SheFi during Octant’s Epoch 9, where it was selected as one of the featured projects. Among so many initiatives trying to make a real impact, SheFi stood out to me for its clarity of purpose: to educate, connect, and empower women in Web3. At the top of the organization’s website, a phrase repeats like a mantra: “The frontier is feminine.” It perfectly captures the spirit of one of the most relevant education and inclusion initiatives in the Web3 space today, a community th...

Few brands have managed to turn marketing into culture like Red Bull. Far beyond an energy drink, it has become synonymous with boldness, extreme sports, and collective experiences that shaped generations. When we think of surfing, skateboarding, Formula 1, or even Felix Baumgartner’s stratospheric jump, it’s impossible not to think of the Austrian brand. The key detail is that Red Bull didn’t start with the mainstream. It bet on niche sports, extreme, underexplored, almost invisible to big s...

We live in a moment where anyone can open a website, type a few words, and within seconds generate an image worthy of a magazine cover, a song that could top the charts, or even a text that looks a lot like this one. Artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction: it has become an extension of our creative everyday life. But when that happens, what, or who, is really behind the work?A concept in constant mutationThe notion of authorship has never been static. There were times when maste...