Yes, the metaverse already exists, and if you’re reading this blog then you are probably a part of it. That the metaverse might not exist yet is one of the most baffling statements that I hear within the space.

There are digital objects, there is a digital community that for the moment is mostly gathered within Twitter, and there’s a dialogue between those objects, that community, and less so, the real world (meatspace).

The place where the real and digital world collide, and the two worlds themselves, is the metaverse. And right now it’s in the Internet-stage equivalent of command line computing, at least, if you think of the “metaverse proper” as being a full headset/AR set-up.

The underpinnings of the imaginative world are the objects that encompass it, which are NFTs. The community has created a subculture that breathes on its own and is truly web3 native, though communication happens mostly off-chain and through centralized options. Still, it’s not hard to see a day when these communications are done on-chain with enhancements like ZK-proofs and general adoption.

And in this subculture, as those of us within it certainly know, things move at lightning speed. With this being the first true NFT bear market, the stage was set for any number of scenarios. Would volume plummet, setting the stage for a total reset? What projects would survive?

At least in early January 2023, the pace for the NFT market has been nothing short of frenetic. Top volume collections are seeing a resurgence across the board and the pace of the Twitter subculture has quickened and even drawn comparisons to the long ago era of 2021.

DeFi has been seeing action, and a few memecoins have had a moment. The buzz is back in the crypto markets, at least for the time being, and within the global scope that is macroeconomic contraction (also known as, a recession).

Open editions have been popping up with new burn mechanics, and if you sleep too long at night, it seems like you could miss the next piece of alpha or hot collection. When I began writing this article, I wondered about which example of a hot collection would be best to exemplify this speed of the space’s “meta,” and lo and behold, feetpix.wtf pumped to over $250 USD.

If you want to be in an NFT-related conversation at 4 o’clock in the morning your local time, you need only be in one of many Twitter spaces that are available to you via the bird app. And if you want to be a seasoned reply guy out on the streets of Twitter, you need to be ready to put the time and effort in to make genuine connections.

The native NFT subculture seems as though it will endure, although some estimates of the current space that place it at only 100,000 people means there could be some doubt about this.

Still, the ethos of the space as a decentralized, open and truly free place to communicate and spread ideas will survive in a future of billions of users.

And in such a world, NFTs themselves will likely see much less usage as an investment vehicle than they do today, meaning the space might not feel as frenetic as it does now even as there are more magnitudes of tokens and projects being created, as communities are more siloed and niched.

If NFTs become the standard, then the community native to the space stands to benefit as well. There may not be an “NFT culture” the way there was when there were 100k people in the space, but those initial people will still be involved in their own areas of interest throughout the greater arena that encompasses billions of users and thus the global economy.

Whatever your reason for being in the space, and whatever your goals, make sure to pace yourself for the long-term with your health in mind. Burnout is real.

And if you’ve been active within the space over the last few months, you’d be remiss if you somehow thought of the last couple of months as a time of opportunity, as particular collections have seen growth and there have been chances to actually acquire some ETH. More than that even, the energy that got washed away in a sea of derivatives and cash grabs in late 2021 into early 2022 has returned to the space.

It feels like NFTs, like a lot of things within our world today, are beginning to turn a corner. Collections like The Memes by 6529, Sappy Seals, the Yuga ecosystem, and yes, ENS, are continually pushing forward the NFT-native ideas that most excited me, at least compared to more “web2” business applications of the technology.1

As we kick off 2023, digital objects have an opportunity to broaden in scope while the space can still retain its NFT-native culture that still permeates and has been clearer to those that operate within it, as the bots and LARPers have vacated a relatively dry market.

And yet, there have still been opportunities for NFT traders, artists, and developers, as volume looks better than expected in a prolonged macro bear market. Collections have begun pumping again, with money to be made and gains to be paperhanded on the daily in the NFT casino.

New metas have developed with more open editions being favored by creators to promote on-chain activity and community building. Even with the threat of a bear market taking a further sledgehammer to volume over the next year and beyond, the overall amount of creativity and community building that is going on in the space is inspiring for the long-term health of the space.

Established businesses that are coming into the space in the medium-to-long-term are going to try things their own way, and while the prospect of mass adoption needs this type of business planning and application building, the more interesting parts of the space are those that are community-built and surrounding the culture of the medium, as the provenance of the medium makes the journey a literal part of the art.

Nike’s DOT.SWOOSH project should provide a view into how corporations might go about navigating the space, especially as their bridge collection between web2 and web3 paradigms can be directly compared to their in-house web3 project in RTFKT.

The beginning of 2023 has seen the hope sprung from the start of a new era manifested into artistic open editions and the cultivation of better NFT collection organization - which is inseparable from the quality of the collection itself - that is bringing the world of JPEGs and ideas as revolution into view for the first time since most of us non-OGs found the space in 2021.

Assuming that optimism continues throughout the rest of the year, NFTs are set up for their most interesting year yet, with growing adoption and supply but also in a period of macroeconomic uncertainty and perhaps just as uncertain demand. How intense is the recession? When does the Fed pivot, if at all, in 2023? Could your favorite artist drop an incredible collaboration that you’re whitelisted for because you minted an accessibly-cheap open edition? These are the questions that’ll hopefully be answered this year.

And on the subject of a growing supply of NFTs as artists seek to put more out there, with more elements of the creative and business process documented on-chain, this increased production can only be a good thing for the space long-term. Value within NFTs does not derive from scarcity of the image itself, but rather the scarcity of the connected context. It’s why NFT art stolen from artists that died long ago or had no idea of its usage is a legitimate scam, and why a joke mint from an established artist within the space can take on importance due to its context.

It is obvious to traditional establishment players as well as the rest of us that this technology offers opportunity, an entirely new industry built on the zero-to-one concepts of digital versions of provenance and immutability.1

It is provenance and immutability that have given rise to a digital reality (with a shared, agreed-upon, trustless truth) whose interplay with the real world2 is in the process of and will continue to create sociocultural change at a level relatively similar to the Enlightenment and Renaissance movements. Of course, with many theorizing about the Exponential Age (I personally believe we stand as a human race on the crux of history, as we have already eliminated scarcity of food, clothing, and shelter, and now are tasked with reallocating those goods and services in a humane and forward-thinking way), the impact of this movement is likely to drastically exceed that of the preceding revolutionary movements, at least in intensity and almost certainly in perceived intensity, due to the faster dissemination of information.

That increase in the speed of dissemination of information brings with it a change in medium, as the contemporary outlets for thought (e.g. Twitter threads, Medium/Substack articles, more broadly-shared journals/research materials) move faster, spread further, and with compounding effects. And with the rise of decentralization and Web3 in particular, thought leaders have begun to emerge, beginning to brush the outlines of what will eventually form a picture of the grand future of the “digital renaissance” to come and leaving behind the writings, audio, and video that will define a movement in the same way Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” would come to be seen in the context of the American Revolution, but more importantly, the global push for political democracy over political monarchy.

This own unique revolution leveraging unique technology brings with it its own unique characters, which in this case is plain as day in the era of pseudonymous accounts (see: punk6529, Cozomo de Medici) that thrive in a decentralized environment.

Pseudonyms and their use in web3 are worth their own exploration entirely, differing from current “burner”-type accounts in that the decentralization through the creation of digital assets gives non-corporate actors more leverage than the various Terms of Service they have been beholden to across the web in the hopes of not losing their data and information to the person who rightfully owns it (aka the people who own the server).

And how much is an identity worth? The most comparable situation would be popular social media accounts (usually meme-spammers), which have become a fairly lucrative business.

It is hard to know exactly how the decentralization revolution of the next decades will play out3, but the key thoughts and writings (think social media posts as being analogous to Revolution-era pamphlets) of the movement that has been unleashed by blockchain are being formulated right now, in punk6529’s and Vitalik’s blog posts, as well as in Twitter threads, Discord servers, and in the art that people choose to make that’s unique to the medium of digital assets.

Begun with the Internet and its increase in the democratization of information, the digital renaissance of today is taking place both on Ethereum, just as importantly but more subtly through the proliferation of the Bitcoin network, and more broadly through other decentralized layer-one’s who have yet to stand the test of time.4

But what this movement really is is the evolution of the Internet into a place as “real” as the universe around us, with provenance and immutability being the innovations that allow this “other-verse” to exist, and ideally with rules unalterable by any one actor or colluding group, vis-à-vis the laws of nature in our physical reality (e.g. Elon can’t change the laws of gravity or motion, at least for now). *That *is what makes this whole place different from digital goods on private servers. In fact, that is what makes this whole place a place at all.

And it’ll be the business use cases that are enabled by having a globally shared database that will take this to the next level, for better and for worse. The capitalistic concerns of what seems to many to be skins and DLCs on steroids, and you live with your eyes in a box and maybe you and your family have been robbed of human things like owning land, financial independence, and most physical pleasures, but hey at least you own some digital items with a long historical background dating back to your *um* 20s, seem to be well-founded at times. And yet a renaissance of artistic and creative thought — built on open communication and value transmission as principles not agreed upon by governmental agreement but by cryptographic consensus over a global network that includes a more equitable set of human beings than before — is begging to be unleashed, held back by the all-too-human fears and inclinations that favor stasis and the established order, which historically has hardly done any good from keeping inevitable new advancements from breaking through and revealing a new paradigm.

This new paradigm is one of digital sovereignty, pushing the invention of the Internet to its logical next step of having real-world properties of history and finality. And the cycle of cultural disruption that we saw on social media will play out again with quirks unique to the “web3” way of doing things.

Where platforms rose to dominance in culture, now will more decentralized media platforms, or at least media platforms more catered to an audience inclined towards the benefits of digital sovereignty (few now, hopefully more down the line). Across music, film, art, and new NFT-native mediums, general culture will be disrupted by this increasingly decentralized media landscape.

First movers to the technology will have the OG status that will give them an advantage, but it’s really anyone’s guess exactly how culture will shift as a result. One thing that is sure is that with a more decentralized artistic landscape, the average person will interact more directly with art than they do currently.

In the better-case scenarios of what an open metaverse can bring to the world, this refocus on art and creation can become a Digital Renaissance — a real global movement to rival the original Renaissance in impact — based on the principles of digital ownership and identity rights that will start digitally and transfer to the real-world as the metaverse5 as it continues to scale.

The metaverse is already something in between a black hole and a rabbit hole, in that it already exists with digital provenance and immutability that will live as long as the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks continue to survive, with a story being told and more people being onboarded every day. Essentially, discussions about the metaverse as an entirely futuristic concern are foolish. The metaverse is already here; most people just haven’t joined yet.

And in any global movement, especially one that’s seeking to piggyback off the phrase “Rebirth,” there are thought leaders expressing and impacting what will become the core tenets of the digital renaissance.

Just as writers and thinkers like Kant, Voltaire, and Locke made many writings and pamphlets that won the hearts, minds, and ideas of those who generally agreed on concepts and principles like “knowledge through reason” and freedom as means of happiness for humans, so too are leaders like Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum), punk6529 (a Cryptopunk pseudo-identity who writes about the principles of this movement frequently, and has served as a personal inspiration), and projects like NounsDAO putting down the ideals of what will become a global movement towards individual sovereignty, decentralization, and creativity as means of happiness for humans and as a different way to design human systems.6

Without accounting for the speed of dissemination, as well as the competition faced by any one person’s words over the Internet compared to just those in previous centuries who had the means to have their words printed in masse, there is no difference between Enlightenment-era pamphlets detailing how we can think about this new medium and the Twitter threads written by punk6529 like this one that put things into perspective from a high-level.

Of course, no two thought revolutions are the same, and with the Internet as the base layer for this one (as well as the fact that blockchain/decentralization will impact every area of society), there will be more “thought leaders” than in any other analogous movement.7 And as we’ve seen with some of the most important “influencers” in the space, pseudonymous identities (e.g. punk4156, gainzy, etc.) are possible and important to maintain.

It’s a feature of the medium, and I expect it to become more frequent as people become fascinated with the concept of having a second identity whose reputation is based on one’s digital output.8 How long it takes the metaverse to get to that point is anyone’s guess, but it’s my personal thesis that the digital cat is out of the bag.

All told, the blockchain is a new medium for expression, and we should expect new mediums of art, culture, politics, business, and new mixtures we couldn’t have seen before created on top of it. Digital provenance and immutability (where something came from and what’s happened to it) give the digital landscape its own version of flesh.

One should not be afraid to release their own thoughts on this whole nu-renaissance out to the world. In fact, this movement is counting on it.

**end.**9