2020 was a hell of a year.

Lots of charts that looked like this:

Screen time, through the roof:

Remote work. Ecommerce orders. Zoom minutes. Retail trading volume. Digital art sales.

The list goes on.

All accelerations of trends, nothing particularly surprising given the circumstances.

What is difficult to plot on a chart is the proportion in which our identities are shifting from offline-first to online-first.

Physical status symbols are of no utility if you aren't going outside.

If the internet is where you get your culture and build your relationships, it's also where you signal your status.

Video game designers have been printing money off this insight for much longer than it's been in the covid-induced zeitgeist.

Fortnite was making $2M a day via in-game purchases on the app store when it launched in 2018, selling infinitely replicable lines of code that changed the appearance of an avatar.

Add non-fungibility to the equation, supply drops and demand rockets.

On Monday, Larva Labs (creators of now infamous Cryptopunks) sold ~$72,976,613 of their project Meebits, 20,000 unique 3D avatars with various degrees of rarity (with secondary market sales of single tokens already reaching 420 ETH ~$1.3m at time of writing).

Let the non-fungible status signaling begin.

2020 was a hell of a year.

Lots of charts that looked like this:

Screen time, through the roof:

Remote work. Ecommerce orders. Zoom minutes. Retail trading volume. Digital art sales.

The list goes on.

All accelerations of trends, nothing particularly surprising given the circumstances.

What is difficult to plot on a chart is the proportion in which our identities are shifting from offline-first to online-first.

Physical status symbols are of no utility if you aren't going outside.

If the internet is where you get your culture and build your relationships, it's also where you signal your status.

Video game designers have been printing money off this insight for much longer than it's been in the covid-induced zeitgeist.

Fortnite was making $2M a day via in-game purchases on the app store when it launched in 2018, selling infinitely replicable lines of code that changed the appearance of an avatar.

Add non-fungibility to the equation, supply drops and demand rockets.

On Monday, Larva Labs (creators of now infamous Cryptopunks) sold ~$72,976,613 of their project Meebits, 20,000 unique 3D avatars with various degrees of rarity (with secondary market sales of single tokens already reaching 420 ETH ~$1.3m at time of writing).

Let the non-fungible status signaling begin.