we tossed erc-721 in the drawer way too fast. the digital art mania, the pfps, the stimulus checks. yeah, that era had noise. but the standard itself? still elegant. still useful. we just attached it to a hype cycle and then walked away when the music stopped.

back then, some platforms like mirror flirted with the right ideas: collecting essays like you collect prints, except onchain. that’s a great mental model. you don’t “like” an essay; you own it. but the timing was rough. infra was clunky. fees were high. “token” was a dirty word. platforms couldn’t ship what they wanted without tripping over stigma or gray-area rules.

fast forward. a bunch of the blockers are different now. stablecoins are everywhere and onboarding new users. wallet ux is better. the regulatory posture is not hostile. the environment is finally friendly to simple, durable products that don’t apologize for using tokens.

make erc-721 boring again, in the best way. we don’t need a metaverse; we need receipts.

collectibles are just receipts with culture attached. that’s what made the early nft moment fun before it got silly. we can bring that back. look at what courtyard is doing with pokémon cards onchain. that’s the bridge: physical culture, digital proof, simple ownership without over engineering. we do not need to invent new types of demand; it’s about tracking the thing people already care about in a way that’s portable and programmable.

NFTStrategy™️ is a strong example of how experimenting with nfts in new ways can help revive communities. paragraph acquiring mirror and continuing their mission is another. same with music. i see cooprecords taking another run at music nfts, now with better rails for streaming, splits, and payouts. that’s the right direction. communities want to back artists early because they want to be part of the liner notes. let the nft be the membership card, the ticket, the unlock. keep it obvious. keep it useful.

if you’re building, the playbook is not complicated. pick one unit of culture (essays, tracks, photos, trading cards), make minting cheap and one-click with a stablecoin, let collectors build shelves that travel across apps, add minimal and honest incentives (a token that boosts reach and routes value back to creators), and ship small.

there’s still low-hanging fruit everywhere. and we’ve lost sight of what made nfts powerful in the first place: permanence and provenance.

ethereum isn’t going anywhere. as long as the internet exists, ethereum will be producing blocks. that’s real permanence. when you pin something onchain—art, writing, music, whatever—it’s there. no platform risk, no subscription fees, no company deciding your work “doesn’t fit the brand.” the chain doesn’t care; it just keeps producing blocks.

and provenance—knowing the exact history of a thing: who created it, who owned it, when it changed hands—that’s powerful. the primitive for proving authenticity and ownership didn’t vanish. it still matters, maybe more now than before.

the difference today is everything around the primitive. you can attach distribution tokens without regulatory risk. you can design clean incentives and business models for collectors. you can try new models of ownership and support. the pieces are in place.

zooming out, this is pattern recognition. don’t assume an idea failed because it was bad. sometimes the idea was right and the environment was wrong. right now, the environment is the best it’s ever been.

erc-721 isn’t dead. it’s one of the most elegant standards we have. remember that and build again—this time with better tools, better infra, and a better environment.

the hype cycle moved on. good. now we can get back to building things that actually matter.