Because of him, I developed a deep love for shisha. He brought only the highest quality tobacco back from Iran. To this day, it may still be the best shisha I have ever had. It became one of my most pleasurable vices, tempered only by the knowledge that it is far more harmful than cigarettes, whose taste I never enjoyed.

Since then, I have indulged in my own fair share of vice. Caffeine, alcohol, and gambling being the most obvious and frequent. And of course there are others, consumed more selectively, only with the right company and at moments that felt intentional.

Because I was never a smoker, vapes never interested me. Somewhere along the way, Zyns entered the cultural bloodstream. I had vaguely registered the discreet nicotine warning label and moved on. I rarely consume nicotine beyond the odd shisha session every six months or so, so I had no interest. That was, until one afternoon at the office, when a coworker asked if I wanted a nicotine pouch.

The circular container she handed me was not a Zyn. It was delightfully designed, bright yellow with concentric circles. The flavor was banana. I was intrigued but unconvinced. As I hesitated, another coworker walked past, eight months pregnant, and casually said, “Oh, that’s really good.” As someone who is proudly childfree, who was I to question the soon to be mother?

So I took it. And good it was. Tasty, even. Once I got used to the odd sensation of having something tucked between my gum and lip, I decided this was a trend I could get behind.

I did not do so without research. Any drug, even caffeine or alcohol, has its drawbacks. Was a nicotine pouch a day any worse than three, or at times even a dozen drinks a week? The science suggested it was not.

Still, I came to understand why nicotine is called addictive. Six milligrams once gave me head spins. Now I barely feel it at all. It has become something I reach for when I want to take the edge off social anxiety without drinking.

I caught myself wondering if that was what addiction felt like.

Years ago, during a period of serious depression, I tested the outer bounds of my alcohol tolerance by drinking an entire bottle of tequila in a single day. Throughout that same day, glass in hand, I baked a pumpkin pie from scratch and brought it to a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by an ex colleague in Singapore. In hindsight, I must have seemed unhinged. Alcohol numbed feelings I could not articulate, yet there I was, socializing, functioning, only just skirting delirium.

I remember thinking then if this was how people became alcoholics.

I took myself to therapy. I took every screening available. None indicated addiction. Everything came back negative.

I was both relieved and disappointed.

Recently, I picked up On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality by academic philosopher Justin Smith-Ruiu. I am only a chapter in, but one line stopped me cold. “Addiction is a disease, but a strange one: it’s the only disease people yell at you for having.”

If I were diagnosed with addiction, there would be clear treatment plans, from twelve-step programs to medication to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Instead, I was left with a less comforting conclusion. Every substance I have ever taken has been by choice. A conscious decision, whether in celebration or despair.

Which raises a broader question. Why are we so quick to judge the vices we do not share? So eager to moralize behaviors we would never choose for ourselves? In an era increasingly obsessed with optimization, where longevity, discipline, and self control are treated as moral achievements, indulgence itself has begun to look like failure. Figures like Bryan Johnson and Peter Attia, who pursue perfect biomarkers and extended lifespans, are held up as models of virtue. Pleasure, by contrast, is treated as carelessness.

And yet, there is one addiction we rarely pathologize.

For a long time, I suspected that if I was addicted to anything, it was not substances at all. It was romance. Not love exactly, but the belief life is more beautiful when it is charged with desire and potential.

There was a boy I once thought could be something. One day, when our paths crossed in a foreign country after a month of leaving me on read, he lamented not having traveled with his Zyns. So I offered him a full container of mine to tide him through the day.

“You can have mine,” I said. “Take what you need, and return it to me tomorrow.”

When we ran into each other the next day, he thanked me profusely and handed the container back. Later, when I opened it, I was left staring at one single pouch.

The metaphor was glaring. Breadcrumbing, in the most literal sense.

We have barely spoken since. I never brought it up, not because it didn’t register, but because some endings can be recognized without repair.

That, I think, is where addiction shows up. Not in the taking, but in the willingness to dismiss it as nothing. In the quiet math we do to preserve possibility. How much of ourselves are we willing to give simply to believe in a different reality?

It is easy to moralize substances because they leave evidence. Romance rarely does. It drains slowly, politely, under the guise of hope.

Today, I take a Zyn most days at the end of work. I associate the lightheadedness with having completed something. Another day lived deliberately, with limits I understand.

Life is meant to be lived. Through dullness and intensity. Through restraint and indulgence. So long as it is chosen. So long as it is felt.

As my tolerance to nicotine builds, I find myself slowly weaning off this other affliction. And in doing so, I am finally learning to tell the difference between what steadies me and what simply asks to be endured.

It happened almost accidentally, the way many things do when you’re tired, curious, and already halfway committed. I was in New York for FarCon, and the poker game was the last side event on the calendar. I hadn’t played seriously in years, but I’d already paid the twenty-dollar entry fee, and at the end of a long week, that felt like reason enough to show up. Besides, I have a deep aversion to flaking. It’s one of my pet peeves.

That night, I arrived fully expecting to be the fish at the table. I was exhausted, oversocialized, and quietly hoping for an early exit. That intention disappeared the moment I started stacking a few big winning hands. Beginner’s luck, I assume. Soon, I was one of the loudest players in the room, talking shit to the men sat beside me. “You’re like a cockroach!” I exclaimed, after one player came back from busting out for the third time. “In a good way,” I quickly added. At some point, I even DoorDashed a couple of bottles of whisky for the table.

I left with a three-hundred-dollar profit and a very good mood.

Despite the euphoria, I don’t remember a single card from that night. I rarely do. What I remember instead is the feeling of being watched. Not in a threatening way, and not even an unkind one; just the persistent awareness of being the only woman at the table. At one point, when we had to draw cards to decide who would leave to start a new game, I joked to the dealer, “Surely you wouldn’t do this to the only woman here?”

It was a joke, mostly. But it also wasn’t.

I’ve learned how to both embrace and recoil from what that presence tends to invite: curiosity, assumptions, and the quiet, unspoken question of whether I belong.

That night kicked off a run I didn’t expect. After tentatively playing my first casino game at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, I picked up a player’s card and somehow became a regular at Hard Rock Casino Hollywood, right up until I moved. I played at the Hippodrome Casino in London and snuck in another successful round at the Venetian back in Vegas. I even entered my first ever tournament and outlasted more than eighty of the hundred players. It was free to enter, with a Rolex for the winner at stake, but I was still the last woman standing.

Eventually, a poker table was delivered to my new place in New York, assembled with more determination and sheepishness than I care to admit. Somewhere along the way, poker stopped being a novelty and became a ritual.

When my friend and longtime poker player Sean recommended The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova, I learned a few things I was unsurprised to discover. Only about three percent of poker players are women. And while poker is, on its surface, simply a game, it offered something else entirely. It was a way to enter rooms where the rules were explicit, the stakes visible, and the outcome determined by a combination of skill, chance, and nerve.

For the entirety of my career, I’ve worked in male-dominated industries. I started in traditional finance, moved into combat sports, and eventually found my way into tech and crypto. These are spaces where women are still outnumbered, still scrutinized, and still expected to prove that they are not tourists. By the time I reached my mid-thirties, I had grown accustomed to the unspoken evaluation that seems to follow women into these rooms: how we speak, how we dress, how confidently we occupy space.

Poker felt like a continuation of that pattern. Another room. Another table. Another set of rules that everyone else seemed to inherit without question.

I remember speaking at my first crypto conference in Los Angeles in 2022. I was walking through the exhibition hall when a man stopped me to ask whether I knew what NFTs were. When I told him I was speaking on a panel later that day, he looked genuinely startled. Not embarrassed. Just surprised, as though he had misread the room.

That moment lodged itself deeper than I expected. Not because it was egregious, but because it was so ordinary. It was a reminder that credibility, when it comes from women, is often provisional. Granted, but only after inspection.

In the years since moving to the US, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be a woman in business, a woman in tech, and now, somewhat unexpectedly, a woman who plays poker. There are nights when I post photos from games and notice the same visual pattern: one woman, eight men. I think I know how it reads. I also know how little control I have over that reading.

What has changed more recently, and what I still struggle to articulate, is how being single seems to amplify all of this.

In my mid-thirties, unattached, and moving through professional and social spaces that skew heavily male, I’ve become newly aware of an additional layer of scrutiny. Conversations that feel harmless in one context suddenly feel risky in another. Talking about my weekend, my dating life, even my hobbies can start to feel like a liability, as though sharing too much might quietly erode the seriousness I’ve worked to build.

No one has ever told me outright that this is inappropriate. A close friend suggested that this tension might be self-imposed, shaped in part by my Singaporean upbringing. In a society so marked by convention, living life off the beaten path can be awe-inspiring to some but incomprehensible to most.

That is what makes this so hard to name. The pressure is ambient rather than explicit. A sense that being open, whether about who I am seeing, where I went, or how I spend my time, might invite the wrong kind of attention. The kind that flattens complexity and replaces intellect with intrigue.

I often wonder if this would feel different if I had a partner. Or children. If I were married, anchored, visibly accounted for. On one hand, I doubt I would even let myself into these rooms, out of an abundance of caution and respect for a significant other. On the other, I suspect I could show up to the same spaces, with the same hobbies, and be viewed entirely differently. Stable. Serious. Safe.

Instead, there is something about being single and highly visible in male-dominated spaces that seems to unsettle people. Or perhaps it unsettles the stories they tell themselves. The attention that follows can be off-putting, like the man at the Hard Rock who hollered across the room asking if he could buy me a drink. More often, it is simply misplaced. Attention focused on my presence rather than my ideas, my availability rather than my capability.

Poker, oddly enough, has helped me see this more clearly.

At the table, everyone is playing with incomplete information. Judgments are made based on what is visible: posture, timing, confidence. Bluffing is part of the game, but so is restraint. You learn quickly that revealing too much, too early, can cost you. Not because you are wrong, but because others will use whatever you offer to construct their own narrative.

I have started to recognize how often women are placed in a similar position off the table. Expected to perform competence without appearing threatening. To be personable without being misread. To take up space, but not too much of it. The tension is familiar enough that it has already been named and popularized, most memorably in Barbie, which articulated what many women already understood long before it reached a screenplay.

What I wrestle with most is not the imbalance itself. It is the way it quietly shapes behavior. How it teaches women to self-edit. To hold back stories that might humanize them, because it is never quite clear whether humanity will be read as depth or as distraction.

I will continue to choose rooms where I am in the minority. Poker tables. Conference halls. Industries that have not yet figured out how to make space without suspicion. I am not sure whether this is defiance or habit, or simply where my interests have led me.

What I hope for, plainly, is a day when my legitimacy is no longer conditional. When my intellect no longer needs guarding, my complexity no longer needs rationing, and my personal life no longer needs to be strategically obscured.

At the poker table, at least, the rules are honest. You play the hand you are dealt. You read the room. You decide when to show and when to fold.

I am still learning how to do that everywhere else.

I can’t remember when Christmas last felt this un-Christmassy. Not because I’m traveling today. Not really because of a lack of effort. I threw a holiday party and served mulled wine alongside an elaborate charcuterie board. I have a seven-foot living and breathing Douglas fir that I painstakingly decorated so it could give off designer. I even spent two hours watching YouTube Shorts on repeat to learn how to tie a bow properly. [Side note: It is impossible pick up a skill in fifteen seconds; I cannot recommend enough watching regular YouTube videos instead.]

I deliberated for weeks before deciding to go home for the holidays. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I have parents in my 70s to see; nephews aged 7 and 5 that I have yet to spend a Christmas with since the pandemic. It was that my year had been so unpredictable that by the time I felt comfortable disappearing into a time zone thirteen hours ahead, flights had become both exorbitant and unavailable.

In the end, I pulled the trigger and settled on spending Christmas in the air.

2025 has been a year of motion. Before this flight, I’d taken forty others: eight and a half days in the air, eighty-eight thousand miles traveled. Apparently enough to circle the Earth three and a half times.

My body has been on the move. So have my mind, my heart, my spirit.

This year alone, I went through a breakup, sold a company, published a book, and started a new job, only to have that company acquired three weeks later. I moved apartments. Moved cities. Moved states. It was also a year of firsts: my first time vibe coding, my first NFL playoff game, my first attempt at DJing, my first Turo rental, my first speeding ticket (incidentally, not in the Turo).

It was also a year of revisiting firsts. My first time writing poetry since 2008. My first time living in New York since 2011. My first time snowboarding since 2015. My first first date since 2019. My first time living alone since 2021.

I work in an industry that moves faster than you can keep up with, one that proves you wrong over and over again. Yet most people around me seem to have found a sense of settlement. Not settling for, but settling into something: marriages, partnerships, children, careers with rhythm.

Not I. I am anything but settled.

There were moments this year when that in itself felt deeply unsettling. And many others where it felt exactly right, exactly where I needed to be, exactly who I needed to become.

George Orwell, in his novel 1984, famously coined the term doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at once, and accept both as true.

If I remember 2025 for anything, it will be the year I became comfortable holding contradictions. Craving routine while still wanting spontaneity. Enjoying being alone while still feeling a deep sense of loneliness. Wanting love while fearing intimacy. Wondering what it would be like to build a life with someone again, while still defiantly clinging on to my independence. Feeling homesick, yet knowing there is nowhere I would rather be right now than here – in a country where my right to stay can change on the whim of one arguably deranged man.

Christmas this year has been like the rest of it, spent in a liminal space. Somewhere between time zones, between versions of myself, watching the map inch forward on a seatback screen. I am unsettled. But I am moving. And for now, that is all that matters.

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, I ask you for only one thing! That is, to my pick up a copy of my first book, Digital Mavericks, or leave a review if you already have a copy. I make literally a dollar on every sale – I just want to make crypto more human and accessible, and I think my book does just that 💛

Gratitude is trading one holiday for another: a ritual you never grew up with, but one you’ve started looking forward to.

Gratitude is knowing your family is safe and held, even when you’re not the one there to hold them.

Gratitude is the hazy nights with strangers: lust, longing, the soft thrill of being no one’s past, nor ever having to be their future.

Gratitude is leaving a five-year relationship because the version of you who stayed would not have survived it, not in the way that matters.

Gratitude is the morning sound of your dog’s paws, fourteen years of soft insistence, teaching you that love can be simple, even if impermanent.

Gratitude is the friends who knew you before the ones you met on the internet: proof that people can know you equally, simply in different ways.

Gratitude is turning a year older, somehow not looking it, and still wanting to learn and try new things.

Gratitude is starting over without knowing where it ended or where it began, but choosing to do so anyway.

Gratitude is arriving in new cities with nothing but your name, your hunger, and the quiet hope that you can make a life out of sheer intention.

Gratitude is being fully alive inside every moment that asked too much of you, because you love this life, and get to meet it again tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A shameless plug for my first DJ mix — feel free to skip straight to the music. But if you’re in the mood for something warm and fuzzy, the words might do you good too. :)

A couple of months ago, I decided to pick up DJing. I still can’t tell if it started as a whim, if it was sparked by watching my friends Robin and Jen (SoundClouds linked!) effortlessly crush their sets, or if it was just something I’d always wanted to do but never knew how to begin.

It was the second week of September, and I had exactly 13 days left in Miami before relocating to New York. One mile from my apartment was a place called Miami DJ Academy. They offered a 10-lesson crash course that promised to take you from complete beginner to playing your first set.

Fuck it, I thought. If there was ever a city to learn how to DJ, it had to be Miami — a place where nightlife is practically a sport, where people commit to nothing except vibes, and where Space (yes, the club that basically never closes) sits like a shrine to chaos. One of my friend’s coworkers actually goes to Space at 6am to get a dance in before work.

So I signed up. And somehow, my instructor turned out to be Space’s first-ever resident DJ. Iconic. I went to class every day, learning everything from beat-matching to finally understanding what at least 70% of the buttons and dials actually do.

“DJing is more than just pressing buttons, hur,” Robin texted me after I breathlessly updated him following every single lesson. (He was right. Unfortunately.)

Two weeks later, I was officially a graduate of the Miami DJ Academy. I even have a certificate to prove it. I agonized over a DJ name: DeBoRaH (pronounced deh-boar-rah) had potential, so did D.Sol and DeeSun. Honestly, it’s surprisingly hard to make a cool moniker out of your own name. In the end, I went back to safronova. For people who knew me in my early crypto days, it was my Discord handle. For people who knew me in middle school, it was my gaming handle.

Now it’s my DJ name.

I don’t like half-assing anything. Not in love, not in work, not in life. And definitely not in hobbies. I watch NFL games in multiview every week. I have a poker table in my apartment. I found a publisher for my writing. I’ve spent hours leveling up my vibe-coding — from simple frontend apps to smart contracts that distribute split payments, to running server-side actions on Privy wallets.

So when it came to DJing, I felt like I had to be equally extra. If I was going to learn a new skill in my thirties, I wanted to do it properly: to be a beginner with intention, with joy, and with the kind of unnecessary enthusiasm that makes life feel full.

Cue the inevitable: a completely unnecessary $3,000 all-in-one controller. My only moral victory was knocking $500 off the price by driving an hour in peak traffic to the depths of Queens to pick it up from a mom-and-pop audio store that’s been around longer than I’ve been alive.

I lugged this unwieldy piece of machinery home, unboxed it, and tapped the power button. As a constellation of LEDs flickered awake, I wondered, What have I done?

And in that moment, the answer to that question felt like mild horror — a full audit of my life choices and financial decisions. But after sitting with my XDJ-XZ lovingly for a few weeks, that answer has shifted. It’s become one of gratitude, excitement, and a soft, sparkly kind of naïveté.

Writing is still my truest creative outlet, but mixing music is suddenly a very close second. I’ve spoken about my love of curation before. It’s one level of abstraction when it’s about a physical space, and an entirely different one when it’s about shaping a mood, a memory, a night. Suddenly, I was scratching a part of my brain I didn’t even know needed attention.

I’ve been practicing in every spare moment. I even received a friendly noise complaint barely a month into moving into my apartment.

I’d been planning to make this Latin mix since the day I left Miami. It was meant as a soft goodbye, with the working title Gracias por todo, Miami. But now that I’m here in Buenos Aires this week, something in me has shifted. The nostalgia is still there, warm at the edges, but what’s louder now is possibility.

Maybe that’s what learning something new does. It tilts you forward. It asks you to stay open, to stay searching, to meet life where it’s going instead of where you left it. A quieter kind of courage. A willingness to be surprised.

So this is the mix that came out of that feeling: Buscando un Porteño.
Enjoy.

I stopped to take a photo.

I had spent the past four years building a new life in America — founding and exiting a business, publishing a book — and yet there I was, hesitant about starting over, meeting new people, and not entirely sure what I’d signed up for.

It turned out the truck wasn’t random at all. It was a piece by local artist Benny Cruz, whose handwritten phrases read like love letters to this city:

“She has a soft heart, but is New York tough.”

“I’'ve been everywhere, but my heart is still in New York.”

“It’s not about what you can learn about New York, but what New York can teach you about yourself.”

Since then, I’ve bounced between New York, Miami, and countless cities for work... so often that half my coworkers assumed I already lived here.

In reality, I only “permanently” relocated less than a month ago. I use the word loosely. Since the pandemic, every move I’ve made has been on borrowed time: the first 120 days on a tourist visa – split by a visa run to Costa Rica – then three years on a different kind of visa renewed through hoops and legal fees. Along the way, I’ve moved apartments four times and states twice.

It would be pure folly to believe in permanence in a country where I am, by definition, an alien.

Yet somehow, I keep making homes. Over and over. In an age where digital nomadism is celebrated, I am anything but.

As spontaneous as I am, I crave routine. And as much as I long for deep connection, I love what sociologists call weak ties — those low-stakes interactions with the barista or grocery store cashier whose name you never ask for. It turns out these small exchanges create a sense of belonging, no matter how temporary.

So whenever I move, I pour myself into creating a space I love spending every waking minute in. It’s a toxic and expensive trait. I love a project. I love to decorate. Above all, I love curating. I love creating.

An empty apartment to me is a blank canvas to a painter; an empty page to a writer; a movie waiting not just to be screened, but to be cast and produced.

Just yesterday, I went to The Other Art Fair and came home with three new pieces, and in a way, three new weak ties. Each one a small, lasting connection to the artists behind them, as long as their work lives on my walls.

Even then, I don't feel like I'm done. I’m determined to leave no wall uncovered. Call it my maximalist era. If I can’t control how long I stay, I can at least decide what it looks like while I’m here.

So here we are. In less than 30 days, and despite unironically spending a third of them on the road, this space has already started to transform.

Next week, I’ll be opening my home to half a dozen people over a game of poker, maybe more. Somehow, I’ve found an uncharacteristic New York apartment: a private backyard still overgrown with weeds and potential, and a basement the size of most people’s entire homes.

Yet it’s already starting to feel like mine.

The walls are no longer bare; they carry the scuffs and uneven patches from my inept DIY skills – hammering nails into drywall, missing the mark, then patching over the evidence like nothing happened. Every corner holds a piece of furniture I painstakingly assembled myself with an Allen key and a Phillips screwdriver.

Memories here are sparse, but not for long.

"New York is the end of your past and a place of rebirth," was what Benny Cruz wrote on the other side of that truck.

There’s something about this city that makes you believe in second chances. And indeed, this is my second go-around. The last time I lived here, I was a broke graduate student. I collected abandoned furniture off the sidewalk, survived off $2 Yuenglings at the neighborhood dive bar, and somehow found myself on every promoter list in the city to afford a night out.

When I decided to return, I thought to myself: here we go – starting over, all over again. Perhaps I am simply just continuing, picking up the thread of who I’ve always been and weaving it into something new.

Soon there will be music in the basement, people spilling out into the backyard, stories crossing languages and timelines. The weeds will thin out, the art will shift, and maybe I’ll move again.

But for now, this is exactly where I need to be.

For now, I am living my dream, even if I keep forgetting.

I didn’t think leaving would feel like this. I never wanted to move to Miami in the first place, and I hated my first six months here: lonely, unbearably hot, humid, and unrelenting. Moving to Miami broke something open in me. Maybe it was the catalyst that ended a five-year relationship that I thought was going to be my forever. Or maybe it was simply just time, running itself dry even when everything still looks fine on paper.

And yet, today, as I watched the movers glide through my apartment with almost surgical efficiency, I felt a pang I didn’t expect. A deep longing for what was, and what will never be. Like a life cut short mid-sentence.

A few hours later, I stood in that same apartment, now completely bare. Six months ago, it had felt like a symbol of reinvention — a space I had built, designed, and curated for singlehood, for starting over. Now it was just me, my dog, two suitcases, and an unopened bottle of Asahi. I cracked it open at 1pm, in spite of six meetings ahead of me. Part pragmatism — I needed to clear out the fridge. The rest, symbolic. Leaving deserves a toast, after all.

Knowing today was imminent, I’d spent the past few weeks saying my goodbyes in small, deliberate ways. I played poker at the Hard Rock almost every week, simply because I knew New York didn’t have a casino, at least not yet. I finished a DJ course under Space’s first resident DJ. I watched Messi play, maybe for the last season of his career. I ate maduros and vaca frita as one of my final meals. And one night, I smoked hookah on Miami Beach while listening to live merengue with an old flame, the ocean breeze threading through my hair.

Still, today, as I stood in line at the airport, the tears came. The kind that roll down your cheek slowly, like something out of a film. As I wiped them away to make polite conversation with the unaware stranger standing behind me, I couldn’t tell if the tears came from sadness or from the quiet panic of everything this day held.

After moving around so much, I’ve learned that calling any place home is a privilege. It’s not that Miami ever made me feel especially welcome. The Asian food is terrible. I’m fairly certain there are only three Singaporeans in the entire city, all of whom I’ve met and befriended. In other words, Miami didn’t claim me, I claimed her.

I claimed her by becoming a Heat fan for a hot minute… that is, until Jimmy Buckets left for the Warriors. I learned to make ropa vieja from scratch, a version that not only lived up to, but surpassed, the standards of my ex’s Cuban family. And I taught myself Spanish, day by day, until hola, qué tal? became the first thing I said to someone each morning.

I’ve always believed that privilege is something you earn, and then something you spend the rest of your life being grateful for. How lucky am I to have literally immersed myself in a culture so different from my own; to have learned its humor, its rhythm, its irregardless — even if it never quite got me back. How fortunate am I to have formed new friendships in a new city, no matter how fleeting. How blessed I’ve been to have called its sunshine and showiness mine, even for a little while.

I am excited for New York. She was the second home I ever claimed after my birthplace, right after Cambridge in the UK. It feels full circle to return nearly fifteen years later. Waiting for me are familiar faces, echoes of what once was, corners still waiting to be discovered; and very likely, new neighborhoods still waiting to be named.

I can’t wait to move into my new apartment too. I chose her precisely because she’s nothing like Miami. No doorman, no top-of-the-line amenities, and almost certainly not enough closet space. Instead, she offers a private backyard for something zen, and an uncharacteristic basement waiting to become my degen den.

Home isn’t a place you find, but one you keep choosing. Today, I’ve chosen New York again. If you’re here, come find me. I’ll be the one with a black dog and a pocket full of dreams — looking for chips to shove, decks to spin on, and a new friend.

And to Miami: thank you, truly, for everything. Hoy es un adiós, pero no el final.

P.S. Apologies for the double email today; meant to unhide an old (and my first!) piece, and it ended up getting resent to everyone 🤦🏻‍♀️

In between, I’ve gathered moments that feel like treasures I keep in my pocket. Doing ski shots at the tailgate of an NFL playoff game. Dancing to Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico, lost in a sea of pava hats. Ad libbing vocals with a live band, newly formed, in the basement of a Bushwick pizza shop.

I am never alone, but somehow always in solitude.

This year on all accounts has been a good one. I just visited Brazil, making it the 48th country I've stepped foot into. The Chargers are off to a 3–0 start for the first time since 2002 (!!). My Duolingo streak has stretched to 600 days, and my Spanish is getting just about good enough to carry a five minute long conversation with Miami Uber drivers.

Back home, my parents are in their seventies, still healthy and traveling through their own retirement. My nephews, seven and five, stumble bravely through school despite their challenges. And my dog, Guinness, just a couple of months shy from 14, still greets me with a wagging tail and love that asks for nothing in return.

Work, too, has been a whirlwind, in all the best ways. I spend my days with brilliant people working on problems that feel world-changing. I speak on public stages, teach workshops, and sign copies of my book for long lines of strangers eager to meet me. Gratitude overwhelms me. I don’t have to live this life, and yet each day I get to.

Yet, all of this comes at a cost. The tradeoff has been real. I have left behind a tight-knit support system, a cultural identity I have blurred to fit in, and the quiet steadiness of politics untouched by hate or polarization – something that so many take for granted. Still, it feels worthwhile. Not for the accolades, but for the horizons widened; the world made to feel just a little bigger each time.

I am happy. And yet, I often find myself in moments where I feel overwhelmingly sad. There was none more perplexing than after the Chargers beat the Chiefs in their opening game of the season a couple of weeks ago. I had been waiting six whole months for this moment. Every fan does. We convince ourselves that this season will be different, that this year is our year, and that this time the hope might actually hold. And on that night, pulling off the win as the clear underdogs, I should have been bolting the fuck up, and getting the zoomies up and down my apartment. 

Instead, I lay on my couch, head heavy from having just weathered a 48 hour cross-country trip. For good measure, I fired off a few messages to r/Chargers on Reddit and to the Bracky group chat in Farcaster. I have to show excitement, I thought. Yet, the entire time, all I could think about was how incredibly sad I felt.

Is it really sadness? Or is it loneliness? Or is it just everything, everywhere all at once?

This has been a year of contradictions. Happy, but lonely. Grateful, but sad. Excited, but anxious. Liberated, yet stuck. Heart wide open, yet still deeply guarded. Maybe this is the cost of living fully: that you must be stretched to your limits to hold it all at once.

Another big contradiction: I feel everything, and yet sometimes absolutely nothing at all. Maybe that’s why I have been indulging in a few more vices recently, more so than I should.

The most harmless is Sichuan food, piled high with deceptively innocent-looking peppercorns. The more mouth-numbing and tear-inducing, the better; gastrointestinal consequences be damned. Then there are those late nights at the casino: hundreds of dollars turned into chips just to feel the chase of the high, but equally so the tilt of a loss.

I've always enjoyed alcohol, but these days, my consumption is ironically measured. Two drinks, no more, just enough to loosen the mind without clouding tomorrow. And most recently, nicotine pouches: discreet, controlled, a way to flirt with headiness, to test the body without leaving a mark.

And still, every day, I rise. I go to the gym. I still deadlift and squat more than my own weight, easily. I even surprised myself by running a sub-nine-minute mile in a 3.5 mile race on no training and four hours of sleep. I still tend to Guinness with the uncompromising devotion of a mother. I spend hours disappearing into my screen, stitching together case studies, sketching strategies, and balancing budgets with uncommon clarity.

In some ways, I feel like I am living dangerously — teetering on the edge of abandon, yet executing with surgical precision.

Maybe I should give myself more grace. In three weeks, I’ll uproot my life for the third time in four years. This time though, there is no partner waiting, no one to split boxes with. Just me, alone with the weight of it all; wrestling with logistics, untangling loose ends, and stepping into messy beginnings.

Part of me marvels at my capacity for adulting these days. I get some things right, like paying my bills on time. But when you come from a country where everything just works, navigating the “bigger” stuff like health insurance, taxes, and medical appointments feels nothing short of daunting. I’ve lived in America for more than four years and still don’t have a primary care physician. I’m not even sure what they do. The last time I tried to see one, they told me the next opening was in a week. I figured I wouldn’t still be sick by then, so I just gave up.

And right now, I’m defiantly choosing not to sell my car, against all logic — simply because I can’t bring myself to Google how.

The year is soon coming to a close. And with it, the inevitable question: who do I spend the holidays with? Do I spend Thanksgiving alone in an apartment I haven’t found yet? Do I go off-grid on some kind of ayahuasca retreat in a wanton bid to find myself? Do I throw a dart at a map and chase country number fifty before the year is out?

And what about Christmas? Do I buy a tree and decorate it with the ornaments I’ve carried from place to place — glass and porcelain remnants of a life that no longer fits, but still lingers?

I could always fly home. But the idea of a 24-hour journey only to sit across from family and field questions I don’t know how to answer — about love, about timelines, about life decisions — feels heavier than just staying put.

The thing is, I don’t want to have to explain myself. I consider myself a storyteller, but my life isn’t one with a clean narrative. Most days, I show up with a smile. I send memes. I laugh in social settings. I ask how people are doing, and actually mean it. I am present. I am high-functioning. I am good.

But I am also sad. Not always. But often.

And I don’t always know why. It’s not quite loneliness. Not exactly regret. It’s just… a quiet ache I carry. A weight I’ve learned to walk with.

Till then, it’s just me, my Zyn, and a dirty martini at yet another airport. Watching people reunite. Watching the gate fill with the buzz of return, or the heady anticipation of going somewhere new.

I may be alone, yes. But there is no question that I am alive. Deeply.

Maybe just slightly Lost in the thrill of it all, as Frank Ocean sings. But somehow still exactly where I’m meant to be.

Happy. Sad. Grateful. Anxious.

But ultimately, good. Really. And enjoying every minute of it.

Now, I’ve always been a sports fan. I became a massive Manchester United supporter at age ten, even though I’d never been to the UK, let alone set foot in Manchester. Some people might chalk it up to their iconic treble in 1999, but truthfully? I chose them because, as a prepubescent child, “Liverpool” and “Arsenal” just sounded weird. Who would have thought liver and arse made up the names of actual cities?

Fast forward a couple of decades, and I’m starting a new life in LA during a global crisis. I’d always appreciated American football, ever since my one year of grad school in the US, but I never followed it too closely. Still, I made it a point to take Monday morning off every year to catch the Super Bowl while living in Singapore. A little ritual of cross-continental commitment, one can say.

But now that I lived in LA, I had to make a grave decision: Rams or Chargers?

I tried to stay neutral at first, but it didn’t last long. I found myself pulled toward the Chargers, for no real reason, other than the fact that their social media was witty and self-deprecating, Justin Herbert is one of the best quarterbacks of all time, and the team was clearly the underdog. [Spoiler alert: the Rams went on to win the Super Bowl that year.]

The point is, while fandom is sometimes inherited, it’s often chosen.

A feeling. A certain je ne sais quoi.

That very same irrationality governs crypto today.

Some bleed orange for Bitcoin. Others worship at the Church of Ethereum, with Vitalik as their unbothered, hoodie-clad messiah. Then there are the Solana maxis, devoted to the cause even when the token crashed to $8 during the post-FTX doomsday (it is trading at over $200 now).

And I’d be remiss not to mention Hyperliquid — an emerging exchange and protocol with a fiercely loyal user base, where tribalism has taken on an almost performance-art quality. There’s an ongoing campaign involving companies like Native Markets, PayPal, and more to claim its stablecoin ticker, USDH. But more than that, the community has turned repetition into ritual: in response to any discourse, they simply reply with one word.

“Hyperliquid,” they all say.

For those encountering crypto for the first time, all of this can feel... bizarre.

Never mind trying to wrap your head around the technology itself, or just the word crypto, which still carries heavy baggage. Now you’re being asked to understand why there are multiple blockchains, each with its own technical tradeoffs, cultural quirks, and — perhaps most confusingly — fervent communities that treat them like home teams.

In crypto, tribalism isn’t just brand loyalty. It’s identity, ideology, and a deep sense of belonging. The stakes aren't just higher because of speculation; they also feel higher because the emotional investment runs deeper.

Tech has always evolved in cycles. From Geocities to Squarespace. From MySpace and Vine to Facebook and TikTok. But nowhere along the way has tribal lines taken hold quite like it has in this new iteration of the internet.

You see, crypto isn’t just a new tech stack. It’s a new cultural architecture. With it comes a level of allegiance and narrative warfare that’s less “product preference” and more “choose your religion.”

To really get crypto, you have to come to terms with a certain kind of rational irrationality.

Just like there’s often no clear reason someone becomes a die-hard sports fan, the same is true here. People pick their chain, their token, their platform for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it's because they admire the founder, or maybe it's because a friend onboarded them to that particular ecosystem, or maybe it just felt right. The vibes are good, as we say. Whatever that means.

Maybe it's because crypto was born out of a manifesto, not a product roadmap. The Bitcoin whitepaper isn't just technical documentation. It was also a call to arms. A movement built by rebels, misfits, and internet-native idealists.

Crypto wasn't born out of Silicon Valley. It was raised in forums; a counterculture grown from anonymity and a shared distrust of the mainstream.

Now, tribalism isn’t inherently a bad thing. After all, some of the best storylines in sports are born from long-standing rivalries.

I should know. As a Chargers fan, I’m contractually obligated to hate the Raiders, despite not knowing a single Raiders fan personally. We like to say FTR: Family, Trust, and Respect… or more accurately, Fuck The Raiders. It’s utterly ridiculous. But it also raises the stakes on game day. Why not? Why wouldn’t you lean into a little “healthy competition” in the name of sport?

The same goes for crypto. In a perverse way, choosing sides makes the space more fun. More chaotic, sure, but also more alive. Because what’s the joy in winning, if there isn’t someone on the other side to lose?

But we all know that too much of a good thing can turn bad, fast.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read about fights breaking out between Chargers and Raiders fans. Brutal, unnecessary, and completely missing the point. When people start getting scared to bring their families to games, you know that the friendly rivalry is now something darker. The tension dangerous, not electric.

Crypto again is no different. When party lines get drawn too deeply, the energy shifts. What may have once felt playful becomes performative, and very quickly, a form of engagement baiting. It becomes PvP. A zero-sum game. A never-ending cycle of subtweets, dunking, and “us vs. them” thinking... and frankly, entirely exhausting when most of us are just trying to stay the course and build something useful.

I’ve fallen into that trap myself. Not necessarily dismissing whole projects or ecosystems, but I've definitely rolled my eyes one too many times. I've let myself get caught up in the drama, pulling up to X with a bag of popcorn, spending too much time reading threads that go nowhere.

It’s easy to forget we’re all still playing for the same league.

But here’s the irony: this mindset, and all the rivalry and trash talk is exactly what helps crypto grow.

Just like people tune in to watch Celtics vs. Lakers, or El Clásico between Barcelona and Real Madrid, the drama is part of the draw. It sparks curiosity. It gives people something to root for. And it keeps the conversation going. The louder the discourse, the more people start to pay attention.

Of course, everything comes with tradeoffs. The more attention the space gets, the more critics it attracts. More users means more skeptics. More builders means more grifters.

It doesn't stop here. For all of crypto's infighting, there is another bigger, larger divide. The one between crypto "natives" and crypto "outsiders", often referred to as normies. And if you are a normie, you are basically a Muggle in Harry Potter terms.

It’s not just which chain you’re building on. It’s how long you’ve been around. Have you deployed a contract? Have you been rugged? Have you paid $200 in gas fees for a transaction that failed to go through? Have you even bridged to an L2 before basic UIs existed?

There’s an unspoken rite of passage. A belief that crypto stripes have to be earned, not given.

And when big companies enter the space, especially those who haven’t made their way up the dev ladder, they’re often met with side-eyes and skepticism. Even if they are well-intentioned. Even if their presence helps legitimize the space.

That’s the paradox. What crypto not-so-secretly wants is validation from the outside world: institutions, enterprises, even governments. I mean, hey, if it's good for our bags, it's good for our bags.

But, crypto also doesn’t want to feel like it’s being co-opted in the process.

And I get it. We’re a weird crew, us crypto folks. We are excessively allergic to suits, and way too obsessive about vibes. I mean, if your PFP isn’t a mfer that looks like it was drawn in Microsoft Paint, or a pixelated CryptoDickbutt, are you even doing it right?

But we also know: if this space is going to grow up, it needs more than inside jokes and anons.

It needs products that scale. But it also needs people willing to bridge – not just across chains, but across cultures.

One thing is undeniable however: crypto is at an inflection point.

The infrastructure has quietly leveled up. Transaction fees are lower thanks to scaling solutions and L2s. Tooling has matured too: account abstraction is making wallets smarter, while developer kits like viem and wagmi have made it easier than ever to build rich onchain experiences. At the center of it all, embedded wallet infrastructure like Privy (shameless plug) helps to further abstract away crypto’s underlying complexity, so that users no longer need to juggle seed phrases and browser extensions just to interact with an app.

We’re finally entering an era where crypto can be useful, not just speculative. The experience can now be intuitive, as opposed to intimidating. The headlines no longer centered on price swings and scams, but rather on real-world adoption, or corporate milestones – like IPOs, acquisitions, and major partnerships.

The drama may still be loud, but it’s no longer the whole story.

That said, whether you’re launching a new app, protocol, or community, understanding this nuance is key: you’re probably going to piss at least one person off.

Crypto might be built on the principle of credible neutrality, but in practice, there’s no such thing as emotional neutrality. Not yet.

Even the most infrastructure-focused teams eventually brush up against tribal lines, whether they choose to integrate with a certain chain, partner with a certain player, or even just shipping something that challenges the status quo.

Some teams manage to thread the needle, weaving across ecosystems without unraveling their core beliefs. But most of us? We'll still end up with a chain of choice. A token we want to send to the moon. A stack we think is superior. And most importantly, an energy we can vibe with.

And that’s okay. While tribal lines are deep in crypto, so too is its purpose.

We sometimes forget that all teams win when the sport itself wins. All it took was one Taylor Swift for NFL viewership to soar through the roof.

You don’t have to root for the Chiefs (another Chargers rival, unfortunately). But the point stands: we are simply too early to stake everything on one player, one chain, or even one ideology.

There’s room for all of crypto to win, so long as we keep perspective and build with intention.

When you zoom out, the bigger picture is this: for as unserious as this space can be at times, the technology is undeniably serious. Crypto is already reshaping how the world interacts and transacts, right before our eyes.

It may be a while before that future feels wholly familiar.

Until then — lean in. Get weird. Ask questions. Get your hands dirty. Give, not take. Contribute, not extract.

The deeper you go, the more it makes sense. The more you care, the more you belong. And over time, if you let it, crypto will make space for you too.

P.S. FTR.

New York City at 21 was like a dream come true. After spending three years in an idyllic college town that resembled Hogwarts, I was about to start adulthood in a city that I only knew through reruns of Friends, Sex and the City, and Gossip Girl. I remember stepping off the plane, blurry-eyed and brimming with nervous excitement about what was to unfold.

My first weekend in New York still lives in my memory like a flicker of film. I’d moved into a ground-floor apartment on 113th and Frederick Douglass, sight unseen. It was past 9pm. The place was empty, hardwood floors stark and bare. I decided to take a walk around the block and soon spotted a small wooden table abandoned on the sidewalk.

“I could find a use for this,” I thought.

Just as I picked it up, a man came running toward me, clearly agitated. The table, as it turned out, had an owner. The sidewalk was his home, and I was unknowingly raiding it. After a few tense exchanges, we settled on an amicable deal: ten dollars to make the table mine.

It became my TV stand for the rest of the year.

Now, over a decade later – this time older, gainfully employed, and returning on different terms, I know my reintroduction to New York will look different. But in some ways, I suspect it will feel the same.

That sense of wonder.

That ache of beginning again.

A few days ago, I met someone, not from the US, who told me he’d been living in the same apartment in Brooklyn for the past seventeen years. I gasped, loudly.

Not out of judgment, though I think he read it that way at first. I quickly reassured him it was only because I was startled. Somewhere along the way, all the moving I’d done had made the idea of staying in one place start to feel foreign to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve come to see change as the only constant. Or maybe, deep down, I’ve begun to confuse stillness with surrender.

It wasn’t always this way. Outside of college, I had spent my entire life in Singapore. When I returned from my stint abroad, I promptly adopted a puppy. A few years later, I bought my first apartment and moved out on my own. The roots I’d been born into were slowly growing longer, deeper – quietly anchoring me to the only place I’d ever called home.

But even then, something always felt slightly misplaced. 

I’d longed to live outside of Singapore since I was a teenager – years before Crazy Rich Asians hit the screens, and well before Formula 1 lit up our streets. Back then, Singapore felt invisible. Unremarkable to the greater world. Even now, I still get the occasional comment marveling at how good my English is. I suppose it must seem unlikely that a country out East could speak English as its first language. I could explain that not only do I know the difference between they’re and their, but I also studied Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath, to the extent of dissecting their every word.

Instead, I smile, and laugh it off.

I’m not offended. At least, I don’t think I am. Though sometimes, I wonder if I should be.

As I continued to build my career and move through a series of long-term relationships I thought might be the one, I started to feel at peace with being in Singapore. Not necessarily out of resignation, but out of circumstance. I had a well-paying job. I was twenty minutes from my parents. I got to bear witness to my two young nephews growing up – first learning how to walk, then learning how to call me gugu (auntie in Mandarin) on sight. 

A life stitched together by familiarity and love always provides. In comfort, and in closeness. In a way only home can.

Then, the pandemic happened.

Like the rest of the world, we went into a series of lockdowns, eccentrically termed “circuit breakers” by the Singapore government. I continued working my job in live sports, but from the solitude of my 431-square-foot apartment, instead of traveling to stadiums across Asia every other week. Not everyone was as lucky. We lost a third of our company to layoffs and furloughs.

Instead of seeing family and friends in person, we exchanged care packages. There was a certain novelty to it all – like having a sommelier on speed dial to deliver a case of wine, just because. Or discovering a new home baker and placing a dozen orders, because it was an absolute must that everyone I knew try her filled donuts.

There was still closeness, but it was held together by a thread of distance, stitched with WhatsApp messages and small, thoughtful gestures.

I used to say, half-jokingly, that the best thing about living in Singapore is how easy it is to get away. We have the best, most efficient airport in the world, and within two hours, you can be in a country with a completely different culture, language, and pace of life.

You could escape, briefly, and then return to all your creature comforts. To the overwhelming gratitude that comes with clean streets, reliable infrastructure, and food delivered faster than your mood can change. In other words, while you’re living in the 18th smallest country in the world, you still get to lead a life that feels expansive, larger than itself, all with minimal cost or inconvenience.

It was no wonder the pandemic made me pause, and return to that voice inside me, now speaking louder than it had in years. It wasn’t shouting. It didn’t need to. It was a bittersweet realization: that the life I had built no longer fit the person I had always wanted to be, and was still becoming.

So I left. This time with no one’s permission. On no one’s dime but my own. Two suitcases, accompanied by a now-senior dog – once again jobless, starting afresh, and armed only with a heart full of dreams.

Four years on, I’ve lived in LA, Miami, and soon, New York. I consider myself fortunate for being able to move with relatively little hesitation. After all, I’m already so far from Singapore that any city in America feels equally distant. As my brother once said, matter-of-factly, “It doesn’t really matter where you are. You’re just moving from one far away place to another.”

I’m still unsure when I’ll next see my family. Still living a life twelve to fifteen hours out of sync.

Yet, for all its imperfections, America has started to become home in a way. 

LA, which remains my favorite city in the world, still calls out to me like a lover forsaken that I am almost scared to return. 

Miami, which I used to resent in my first six months, has become familiar. My colorful apartment here, filled with art I’ve collected over the years, is now my happy place – a place of rest and quietude.

Choosing to move back to New York hasn’t been a trivial decision. I’ve spent most of this summer there, drifting between Airbnbs and hotels, occasionally flying back to Miami for week-long stretches at most. There have been days where I’d return to an unfamiliar room after a long day of work, overwhelmed by anxiety, and find myself in tears, whispering, “I just want to go home.”

But what is home, really?

Is it my place in Miami, designed and decorated with intention, and dare I say, taste?

Is it Singapore, where I was born and raised, where my support system remains, and from where I still carry its vermillion passport?

Or is it all the places I’ve lived and returned to over a dozen times, from Bali to Tokyo, where I have my favorite haunts, and a quiet familiarity that greets me each time I land?

The song by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes goes, home is wherever I’m with you. But there is no you in my life right now. Just me, my ambition, my desire for more, as if I haven’t lived enough.

As I greet this new chapter in New York, I can only hope I find home once again – as I have before. Over and over. All before knowing what street it will be on, what routine it will be a part of, and more importantly, what feeling it will bring.

The search never stops. Or maybe it does, once I realize it was never a place to find – but something I was meant to build, in myself, all along.

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider ordering my first book - Digital Mavericks: A Guide to Web3, NFTs, and Becoming the Main Character of the Next Internet Revolution. It is a beginner-friendly guide to entering and navigating the crypto industry, filled with heartwarming stories of real-life builders and creators that I hope will inspire you as much as they inspired me.

I took a seat alone at the counter and ordered, perhaps a little too confidently for 3pm, a four-wine tasting flight and a three-meat charcuterie board. Borderline aggressive for one, perhaps, but I was midway through the latest Hunger Games on my Kindle, and it felt like the perfect afternoon for a miniature feast: small luxuries on the plate, dystopian drama on the page. A guilty pleasure for both mind and body.

An hour and a half later, the server approached with my check, and a question. “This may be a little strange,” she began carefully, “but… can I ask you something personal?” 

I nodded.

“Are you single?”

I said yes, bracing for where this might go.

“I couldn’t help but notice you,” she said. “There was something about the way you were just sitting by yourself, reading. You looked completely at peace. It was… kind of inspiring.”

We traded short stories across the narrow space of the bar and my now-empty glasses. Both of us had recently emerged from long-term relationships. The only other time I’d been to Sixty Vines was with my ex, during the week it first opened.

Our exchange was brief, but it felt as if we’d tugged at the same loose thread in the fabric of our lives – heartbreak, loss, and the quiet insistence to keep moving anyway. And in those few minutes, we had moved each other. She had seen my solitude and named it as something whole. I had reminded her it was not only possible, but enough.

I am no stranger to doing things alone. As a teenager, I once went to see a Harry Potter movie at the cinema by myself, simply because all my friends had already gone. In college, my first trip was a solo one to Madrid – back when smartphones didn’t exist and a dog-eared Lonely Planet guidebook was the closest thing to GPS.

This year, as I’ve had to rediscover what it means to be single, my solo experiences have multiplied – not just in frequency, but in meaning. Maybe it’s all been one long act of quiet rebellion. Or maybe it’s simply the slow, deliberate work of gathering back the parts of myself that were diluted, or quietly set aside, over five years of partnership.

A sampling from this year alone: the Chargers playoff game in Houston, tailgating and all. A lone drive to Breckenridge to meet a group of strangers on the slopes, even though my last attempt at snowboarding was a decade ago. The musical moments have been just as varied: an open jam in the basement of a pizza shop in Bushwick; a weekday Beyoncé concert, regrettable only for an unexpected New York spring storm. Each of these encounters has been a quiet reminder that sometimes, you don’t need a reason, a plan, or company.

Sometimes, you can just go. 

Sometimes, you can just do things.

I have treasured every one of these experiences, though the glances from those around me are hard to miss. Never sharp with judgment, but softened by a quiet confusion; an unspoken question hanging in the air. And yet, I’ve never once wished to share these moments. They were special precisely because I had them to myself.

On my most recent solo adventure, I booked a 48-hour trip to Puerto Rico, just three days in advance, to see Bad Bunny perform at his historic residency on home soil. The show is called No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí, which translates to I don’t want to leave here. After years of global stardom, it was Bad Bunny's homecoming – an ode to place, memory, and the roots that shaped him. In interviews about his latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, he speaks about wanting to capture the feeling of coming home: musically, emotionally, spiritually.

As I stood among thousands of fans on an island I had never been to before, I felt the strange ache of being somewhere new while someone else returned to where it all began. I couldn’t help but think of Singapore – my own home, thousands of miles away – about to turn 60 and still less than twice my age. And me, still learning what it means to be both from somewhere and apart from it. Still figuring out how to build a life by myself, in a direction most people back where I’m from would never think to look. One that doesn’t wait for permission, or follow a path already drawn.

Eventually, I settled into my seat and let the music carry me. The concert, and San Juan itself, was every bit as magical as I’d imagined. My spot was between two couples, each sharing the moment in their own way. In both pairs, though, the men wore the unmistakable expression of someone reluctantly in attendance. While their partners stood singing every lyric, they slouched in their seats, occasionally scrolling through their phones or clapping a half-beat off.

It was a gentle and quietly amusing reminder that joy itself is a luxury: best when unfiltered, untempered, and entirely on your own terms.

Navigating singlehood after years of forgetting what it meant has been its own journey: liberating in ways I never expected, and yet, at times, unfamiliar. I’ve said yes to things simply because I wanted to. I’ve enforced boundaries that are mine and mine alone. I’ve learned the quiet pleasure of moving through the world on my own timeline, in my own orbit.

And still, deep down, I think a future would be nice to share with someone. Not just the big milestones, but the quiet, unremarkable parts. Things I once shared with someone every day – grocery runs and morning coffees, quiet glances across a crowded room that said, let’s go. The kind of unspoken rhythm that only time creates. I think about what it would mean to have a witness to the everyday, someone who sees the version of me that doesn’t need to perform. A partner in the long game. A co-architect of a life built brick by brick.

But the idea of commitment now feels heavier than it once did. Not because I fear love, but because I’ve only just begun to understand who I am without it. I worry about what I might lose in the process: the freedom I’ve fought to reclaim, the quiet satisfaction of choosing for myself. The spontaneity that sometimes looks a little reckless but feels like mine. I wonder if intimacy always comes with a cost: if to be loved, you must first be softened, then shaped. If saying yes to someone else means slowly forgetting how to say yes to yourself.

I don’t yet know how commitment makes room for that kind of wildness. I don’t know how love exists without the pressure to shrink.

I think back to that encounter with the server often. Something about my being alone must have given off a kind of energy… if not one of confidence, then at least of comfort. But while I’ve learned how to look comfortable, I’m still learning how to feel it fully.

And maybe that’s the art of being alone: not just knowing who you are without someone else, but holding on to the parts of yourself no one else gets to take.

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider ordering my first book - Digital Mavericks: A Guide to Web3, NFTs, and Becoming the Main Character of the Next Internet Revolution. It is a beginner-friendly guide to entering and navigating the crypto industry, filled with heartwarming stories of real-life builders and creators that I hope will inspire you as much as they inspired me.

If you are wondering why you are receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

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For the uninitiated, an open jam is when musicians gather to make music together. No setlist. No scoresheet. Just vibes. Someone hops on drums, someone takes keys, throw in a guitarist and a bassist, and voilà: music. I’ve always found open jams especially challenging for vocalists. Unlike instrumentalists, we don’t think in chords. We wait for the sound to take shape, then try to find a melody that threads it all together. This happens with or without lyrics, depending on whether we’re lucky enough to catch a phrase in the moment.

When it came to my turn, I was excited, but terrified. The jam had already gone on for over an hour. Five songs deep. It's been a long time since I've performed in public, and I didn’t know if I still had it in me to catch the harmonic cues, or if I’d completely flail in front of a room of forty people. I thought about recording the moment, fueled by a couple of beers and a newly discovered vice via a nicotine pouch, but decided against it. 

However this would go down, it was going to be a moment just for me. No clips, no proof. Just acoustics and adrenaline. Just cheers from a group of music-loving strangers who decided to spend their Saturday night in the basement of a pizza shop.

Much to my relief, I did great. 

Thing is, no one outside that room will know. You just have to take me at my word that it mattered. That a five-minute expression of improvisation, crafted by people who had never met until that night, was something worth listening to. Something worth remembering. Something that brought real, human joy. 

And that’s the thing:
Not every creation has to be documented.
Not every moment needs a market.
Not everything needs to be coined, or collected.
…or do they?

Over the past few months, a new debate has taken hold across crypto: should all content be tokenized?

First came Zora. What began as a minting platform for NFTs (1/1s and editions) shifted toward something different. Now, every post becomes a tradable, fungible token. A coin. The reasoning made sense, both in protocol logic and profit terms: coins are more liquid than NFTs. More buyers, more trades, more fees. In theory, a broader market for content.

The discourse arrived fast and flamed out just as quickly. Some creators leaned in. Others stood back, skeptical that these “new internet capital markets” were truly doing what they claimed to do: creating better paths for creators to get paid than the Instagrams and TikToks of the world.

Then came the new Base app. Formerly known as Coinbase Wallet, it now allows anyone to coin a post, right from their timeline. Built on Zora’s protocol, the mechanics were the same, as was the philosophy. The rhetoric? Everything you create has value. Let's normalize that by giving it a price.

Then yesterday on Farcaster, collectible casts entered the conversation.

Instead of every post becoming a coin, each cast is a one-of-one. This means only a single person can ever collect it. Anyone can kick off the auction by bidding a dollar, and over the next 24 hours, the highest bidder becomes the proud owner of a moment in time. A true collector’s experience, if you will.

That is… until I realized the exact same piece of content can also be coined on the Base app and simultaneously collected as a 1/1 on Farcaster.

Some say this represents two layers of value for one piece of content. I'm still unconvinced. How can something be both infinitely and uniquely ownable at the same time? If a single person collects the 1/1, are they truly the “owner”? Or are they just one of many stakeholders in a moment that now lives on multiple markets?

To me, it feels a bit like saying everyone can own the Mona Lisa... as long as we all agree the Louvre still does.

Which brings me back to my own relationship with all this.

Despite leaning heavily into my creativity over the past year, I’ve never really considered myself a creator. Or maybe more accurately, I’ve never considered myself a full-time creator, where my livelihood depends on my craft. Whether it’s writing, music, photography, or that brief but delightful collage era, I’ve never made things to make ends meet.

I create because I want to. Because it helps me express what I can’t always say. Because it fills my cup. And when something I make resonates, my cup overflows. My heartstrings tug like a violin, grateful and slightly stunned. That someone else felt what I felt too. Whatever the medium, I don’t create to make money. And honestly, I know that if I did, it might ruin the joy of creating altogether.

Even then, when there’s money on the table, how could I say no? How could I not at least explore what it might mean?

So I did.

I coined recordings of my singing on Zora. I’ve coined half a dozen posts on the Base app in the past week alone. And yes, I may or may not have jokingly asked people to bid on my casts in the last 24 hours, with one post currently sitting at a high of $9 (thanks, Charlie).

And last, but not least, I launched my very own $DEBBIE token on Rainbow a few months ago (the CA is 0x3c8e14fe1bf820053979aed1c0f2e480e4cfa44c). Unironically, it’s up 83% year to date, outperforming both Bitcoin and the S&P 500, with a market cap hovering around $70,000.

And this is where the experiment starts to get cloudy. I have made a grand total of zero dollars from Instagram, despite being a relatively early adopter. And while building a following on X has opened doors professionally, I’ve never earned directly from the platform itself. So whether I make a single dollar or a couple hundred in this new onchain economy, I suppose I should consider it a net positive.

But positive doesn’t mean perfect.

While coining my content might be worth something on paper (or in my wallet), liquidity is so low that realizing any actual gains is nearly impossible. And in the rare case that liquidity does exist, it often comes from people looking to trade quickly, flipping in and out before the moment even settles.

In that world, the only way I, as a creator, could profit… would be to dump my own holdings. To cash out. To rug the very people who believed in, or perhaps more accurately, placed a bet on me in the first place.

Farcaster’s 1/1 collectible model feels a little more differentiated. It doesn’t carry quite the same dynamic. But even then, at what point does the novelty wear off? Is auctioning off someone’s content to the highest bidder just a roundabout form of tipping?

I won’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do have a few personal beliefs.

That yes, the blockchain opens up new paths for creators. Especially smaller ones. It offers more ways to monetize, more chances to be seen, and more direct relationships with the people who care.

That I believe in patronage. In people supporting the creators they love, not just with likes, but with dollars. Whether it's a livestream tip on TikTok, a monthly pledge on Patreon, or a quick Noice or TipN inside Farcaster or the Base app, these gestures matter. They’re votes of belief. Signals of care.

That I believe in experimentation. That without trial and error, and without testing not just what works, but feels right, we’ll never get to establish a new paradigm. One that’s not only better, but also sustainable. Not just for ourselves, but for every single person who contributes to this wild, ever-shifting space we call the Internet.

So, if you consider yourself a creative, I urge you to do what you’ve likely always done: embrace the tension. The same tension that’s always pulled you toward making something in the first place.

Be open to new ways of valuing your work. Explore the models. Test the edges.
But also, have the courage to question what feels unnatural, extractive, or even overly transactional.

Experiment freely, but don’t mistake someone else’s rules for your own.
Participate with intent, but never surrender your compass.

And just like my memory of Saturday night’s open jam is mine and mine alone, so too is your craft.

Let no one tell you otherwise.

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider ordering my first book - Digital Mavericks: A Guide to Web3, NFTs, and Becoming the Main Character of the Next Internet Revolution. It is a beginner-friendly guide to entering and navigating the crypto industry, filled with heartwarming stories of real-life builders and creators that I hope will inspire you as much as they inspired me.

If you are wondering why you are receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

If you no longer wish to receive personal updates or writing from Debbie, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings ❤

Profiles are one of my favorite things to write. I’ve written 18 so far — 13 in my book Digital Mavericks, and 5 more on my Paragraph. The joy, for me, lies less in the writing than in the process itself. There’s something about the conversation and the quiet act of listening that feels like a privilege I don’t take lightly. I currently only profile people in crypto, but it’s usually the last thing we talk about. Most of our time is spent on childhoods, heartbreaks, immigrant parents, and unexpected left turns. We talk about books, hobbies, songs, and the cities that shaped them. We talk about what they lost, what they gained, and what they’re still chasing.

My aim is always connection. To help the person I’m profiling make deeper sense of the life they’ve chosen. To offer readers a mirror, so they might recognize a part of themselves in a stranger’s story, and ultimately find the courage to step into something they didn’t think could be meant for them.

So when the tables turned, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew I was excited. My work in crypto has been featured before, but this felt different. A full-length profile in my country’s national news wasn’t just something my friends and family would read. It was something they couldn’t ignore. And maybe, just maybe, it would help justify the life decisions I still find myself questioning.

I was also nervous for that same reason. The piece mentioned a few white lies I’d told my parents years ago (though I’m pretty sure they already knew). And while I’ve got better at speaking about my accomplishments, having them spotlighted still feels deeply uncomfortable, especially when weighed against the Asian values of humility and “do more, say less” that I was raised with.

What I didn’t expect to feel was a weird cocktail of surprise and irritation. Not from anyone who mattered, but from faceless strangers on the internet: quick to take jabs, eager to miss the point. My feature wasn’t a mirror. It had become a canvas for other people’s projections instead.

Parts of the article were, as is often the case with traditional media, written to be clickbait. A push notification sent to CNA app users read: “Driven to put Singapore on the world map, ex-GIC scholar Debbie Soon co-founded a business with Mark Zuckerberg’s sister.” The headline described me as someone who “took a risk and booked a one-way ticket to the US during Covid in search of a job.”

Cue the comments on CNA’s Instagram carousel, which had neatly distilled the feature into seven swipable cards:

"Sounds like a lucky, young Singaporean who… could afford to twang around and do nothing really concrete or develop any real, essential skills without worrying much about money in the meantime," said @cm10_

“Only those with privileges (can) have a ‘chance’ meeting with Mark Zuckerberg’s sister. Already got connections lor," said @kristytingofficial, with a punctuation of Singlish.

And one that was for the lack of a better word, entirely baffling. 

“So you can see the male species have to struggle to keep Singapore famous. I am sure she has a dark side which probably won’t share how she REALLY MADE IT. And when you are a female, it’s ALWAYS ALWAYS easier," said @ghost_in_the_shell_sac_2045

My feelings weren’t hurt. If anything, I was bemused. These comments were tame, and far less vicious than what reality TV contestants endure on a daily basis. (Has anyone watched Love Island lately?)

But it did get me thinking: When did we start breeding an entire subculture of keyboard warriors? What compels someone to post something so bitter about someone they don’t know? And why is it so often women who end up on the receiving end?

None of this is new. It happens all over the internet, crypto notwithstanding.

Just a couple of weeks ago, my friend and founder of Chipped, Winny, posted a harmless video showing all the outfits she wore to Cannes during EthCC. Every look was chef’s kiss. Still, the comments rolled in: “she would look so much better without the tattoos,” and “the biggest argument against liberalism has to be what it does to our women.”

Another friend of mine, Betty, founder of Deadfellaz, has faced this kind of scrutiny for years. But more recently, after an inspiring health journey, she’s been hit with Ozempic accusations, ironically, from the same people who once mocked her weight.

It’s tempting to dismiss all of these comments as noise. Jealousy. Boredom. Or maybe, someone was just having a bad day, I tell myself. But zooming out: a pattern emerges. The internet today is built on ambient hostility disguised as critique, and usually aimed at women who dare to be unapologetically themselves.

Because here’s the thing: the comments aren’t really about Winny’s tattoos, or Betty’s weight, or my resume. They’re about what those things represent: confidence, autonomy, self-expression. Women who don’t shrink themselves to fit someone else’s comfort zone or broader societal expectations. For a certain kind of online commenter, the way we show up  to the world presents not just as audacity, but a threat.

The feminist movement has come a long way. Yet, it’s been a mere fifty years since women have achieved true financial independence. The gender wage gap still exists today even though it’s been a number of years since it’s become acceptable for women to have a career worth celebrating. It’s no wonder that women continue to be punished for being too much. When we do succeed, we are either labeled as cringe, or accused of doing something insidious to get there.

Regardless of the actual comment, what they say beneath it all is the same: you didn’t earn this. You didn’t deserve this. Not like we should have.

But who exactly is we?

That part is less clear. It will be easier if all these comments came from men. Maybe then we could laugh them off as basement-dwelling trolls or full-blown misogynists. Thing is, many of these types of comments come from women too, either jealous or wronged by our success.

The irony? I consider myself far from successful. The work I have done is barely close to complete. Every day, I wake up with a relentless drive to prove to myself, and to the world, that I can and will accomplish more.

To me, that is the beauty of life. The knowledge that every day is a gift. That ultimately, when I do leave this world, there will be few, if any, that will remember what I have done, but while I’m still here, there’s still an opportunity to make a difference. I choose for that delta, small as it may be, to be positive. Naysayers, by advocating for “merit”, “fairness”, and "just asking questions”, somehow think they are doing the same.

But, I don’t write for the naysayers. I write for the ones still finding their way. For the person who’s never seen their story reflected back at them without distortion. I write because I believe stories can be mirrors when we let them. And whenever the mirrors feel too honest, too sharp, or too clear, that’s usually when someone else tries to shatter them. 

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying. So, we keep showing up — even when it’s hard, and even when the reflection isn’t what others want to see.

Over ten years ago in college, I stumbled back into my dorm room grey-to-black (hex code #666666) out drunk from one too many Smirnoff Ices on a night out at Cindie’s, the college nightclub on Cambridge’s main street in the UK. I woke up the following morning to a mirror shattered into over a dozen pieces. Oh no, I thought, seven years of bad luck, or bad sex, depending on the saying. 

Spoiler alert: life has gone on just fine. Sure, I’ve had periods of bad luck, like the time I nearly died from a freak bacterial infection that came from eating raw fish... and um sure, a handful of somewhat unenjoyable sexual encounters. But all things considered, I think life’s circumstances have converged to the mean. Everything I’ve done since then has both been because and in spite of them.

So if the mirror cracks again, so be it. I’ve lived through worse. What matters is that I still choose to look. Still choose to show up. Still choose to reflect, even if it means being misread. 

I hope you do the same. Because no one will ever see you more clearly than you do. And that, truly, is enough to begin.

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider ordering my first book - Digital Mavericks: A Guide to Web3, NFTs, and Becoming the Main Character of the Next Internet Revolution. It is a beginner-friendly guide to entering and navigating the crypto industry, filled with heartwarming stories of real-life builders and creators that I hope will inspire you as much as they inspired me.

If you are wondering why you are receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

If you no longer wish to receive personal updates or writing from Debbie, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings ❤

0xDesigner is a pseudonymous UX designer and content creator best known for his Design Everydays series, which explores user-centered design in crypto. He collaborates with leading crypto companies and is now focused on building AI-assisted tools through a practice known as vibe coding.

In the late 18th century, a novel by the name of Sense and Sensibility was published simply under the handle of “A Lady.” Subsequent works, including Pride and Prejudice, credited only the author’s earlier success. Jane Austen remained anonymous until her death – a decision that allowed her to sidestep gender bias and be judged solely by the weight of her words.

Centuries later, the world may look different, but the instinct to create freely, without the baggage of identity, remains. Banksy. Satoshi Nakamoto. And now, 0xDesigner. A pseudonym not to obscure, but to reveal what matters most: the work.

As someone still learning to quiet the impulse of being seen and affirmed, the decision to be pseudonymous is one I find equal parts unnerving and courageous. In fact, creating without credit runs counter to everything I have spent years trying to unlearn. And yet for 0xDesigner, moving between physical and virtual worlds came naturally. Born into a first-generation immigrant family, he describes his early life as distinct and divided. “My life has always been very compartmentalized,” he says. “There was one way of being in the house, and a different way of being in school.”

Growing up in small schools, identity to 0xDesigner was more of a fluid state than one fixed in fact — a way to move through spaces, not belong to them. “Being in these tiny communities where I had to get along with people I didn’t have much in common with meant I never had a strong sense of belonging,” he explains. “It was almost like a social survival mechanism.”

Still, growing up in the ’90s meant 0xDesigner experienced the early internet as a space of exploration and connection through message boards, dial-up modems, and a new kind of digital freedom. While those formative years may have sparked a comfort with being online, the desire to create came much later.

As a college student double-majoring in economics and psychology, 0xDesigner became fascinated with what makes people tick, from the rational incentives of markets to the messy irrationality of human behavior. “It felt like I was covering all angles,” he says. “Economics taught me how people should behave. Psychology showed me what they actually do.” That tension, the one that sits between systems and emotions, would later go on to shape his entire approach to design.

His first job out of school, however, offered little room for nuance. He spent his days buried in spreadsheets, where the work was intellectually stimulating, but the culture felt like a mismatch. “Here I was, in my 20s, stuck in a cubicle, getting made fun of for drinking $5 coffee and wearing skinny jeans,” he laughs.

It didn’t take long before the corporate grind wore thin. Within a year, 0xDesigner resigned with nothing lined up. “I was reading startup blogs every day and became completely captivated by the energy of it all,” he tells me. With a few thousand dollars saved, which seemed like a fortune at the time, he enrolled in a then-nascent design program. It wasn’t code he was after. “I knew I wanted to work in tech,” he says, “but I didn’t want to be an engineer.” What drew him in was something more primal: the messy, emotional, and deeply human ways people interact with technology.

The experience clarified where 0xDesigner wanted to focus. “We were just making websites at first,” he says. “That was all about designing to persuade, and building desire before the login screen.” What really drew him in was what came after: the moment when design stops selling value and starts helping people experience it.

After selling his first agency, he launched another, this time focused entirely on product UX. With a background in psychology, 0xDesigner found himself naturally attuned to user friction, approaching it through the lens of mental models and cognitive load. “That was the work I was better at, and the work that excited me more,” he adds.

By 2021, 0xDesigner had checked every box, working with dream clients like Facebook, Google, and other Fortune 500s. But when the NFT boom hit, it upended everything. “All of a sudden, the thing I’d spent my entire adult life working toward seemed boring,” he says. “Worse, it felt like it was standing in the way of something far more exciting.”

It wasn’t that 0xDesigner hadn’t heard of crypto. A friend from design bootcamp had been an early Bitcoin adopter, and he’d read American Kingpin, the story of the Silk Road and its cryptocurrency-fueled rise and fall. He even had Bitcoin of his own, safely stored in a hardware wallet since 2016. But nothing in the five years since had truly grabbed him, not until NFTs. 

“Bitcoin made a ton of sense to me,” he says. “But what came after was DeFi, and while I understood the value, it wasn’t something I actively wanted to participate in.” NFTs, though, were different. “They were at the opposite end of the spectrum and the first thing that really resonated with me,” he continues. “It was crypto’s first consumer moment.”

The fact that NFTs were framed as collectibles added another layer of personal connection. “I was a huge sneakerhead at the time,” 0xDesigner says. “So I was already into the idea of identity signaling through the things you own.” His hundred-pair sneaker collection, still boxed up at his mom’s place to her ongoing dismay, took up plenty of space. NFTs, by contrast, didn’t. Instead, they offered a new way to flex shared interests, connect with like-minded people, and tap into a liquid resale market — all without the clutter.

Coming into the space as a collector meant 0xDesigner understood the odds. He never believed NFTs in their then form would retain their value long-term. “I sat on massive gains in NFTs, more money than I had ever made in my life,” he says. “And even though I never realized them, it wasn’t painful, because I knew they were all eventually going to go to zero.”

That awareness, paired with crypto’s inevitable volatility, became the spark for what 0xDesigner is now best known for: his Design Everydays series. “Collecting for me has always been about storytelling,” he tells me. “But the way I coped with the financial side of it all was by showing how much further crypto could go, if only it had more user-centered, intentional design.” While several others (myself included) channeled that energy into writing, 0xDesigner returned to what he knew best: visual storytelling.

Ironically, that same impulse is part of what led him to go pseudonymous. “I was alienating a lot of people with my excitement about NFTs,” he recalls. “To my IRL friends, I was a total weirdo.”

What most people don’t know is that the rest of that decision was shaped by an ill-fated psilocybin trip. In early 2022, while experimenting with microdosing for focus, 0xDesigner took what he thought was a small dose of mushroom chocolate from a friend. It wasn’t. 

“I was absolutely wrecked,” he says, laughing. “Curled up in a ball, crying, on a random Wednesday at 11 a.m.” Six hours later, still coming down, he tried to get back to work, all while simultaneously trying to claim an NFT using a wallet delegation tool with a glaring red user interface. “Everything was red… the buttons, the text, the background… and I was half-tripping, hypersensitive, thinking: this feels dangerous.” He took to Twitter to rant. That off-the-cuff thread about how bad design makes crypto feel unsafe got 50 likes, more than anything he’d ever posted. “That was the dopamine hit,” he says. “And the realization that there was an appetite for design critique in crypto.”

That planted the seed for a two-year-long daily practice. 0xDesigner’s Design Everydays series became a ritual—part critique, part vision board—for how crypto could be more usable, more human. “I don’t see myself as a consistent person,” he tells me. “But I think a lot of it was motivated by knowing that I could put an idea out there that might prompt a conversation or inspire someone to build something I’d actually want to use.”

What kept him going wasn’t virality, but purpose. “Even if I didn’t get a lot of likes or new followers, I knew I was broadcasting something that might have a tiny, tiny impact,” he says. “And I got addicted to that.”

Calling 0xDesigner’s impact “tiny” would be an understatement. He’s been invited to collaborate with top crypto brands like MoonPay and speak at major industry events. Still, joining any one company has never been the goal. “What made the practice valuable was having permission to take a bird’s-eye view,” he says. “Not being tied to a single product gave me space to synthesize ideas across use cases, and that’s become my creative superpower.”

After two years, 0xDesigner brought Design Everydays to a close, not out of burnout, but because the landscape had changed. “I wasn’t tired. I could’ve kept going,” he says. But as memecoins and trading chatter crowded the timeline, the clarity that once energized him began to dissolve. “I realized I’d lost sight of what made me feel excited about crypto in the first place,” he explains. “I‘m not here to optimize trades. I’m here to help crypto make everyday life better.”

While 0xDesigner has aired his misgivings about the growing trend to turn every piece of content into a coin, he’s since shifted his energy to an adjacent frontier: AI. “Whether it was startups in the early 2010s, product design in the mid-2010s, or NFTs in the early 2020s, I’ve always thrown myself fully into whatever felt like the next big thing,” he says. “And right now, that thing is AI.”

Despite joking online that he’s “pivoting to AI,” 0xDesigner doesn’t see it as a departure from crypto—it’s an evolution. Vibe coding, a term coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, describes a more fluid, AI-assisted approach to building software. For 0xDesigner, it’s become a new medium. “Instead of putting out ideas to inspire others, I can now bring them to life myself.”

The tools may have changed, but the mission hasn’t. “I have strong opinions about how I want to see crypto used,” he says. “I’m not trying to become a successful app creator. I just want to show that crypto can be meaningful beyond finance.” Vibe coding is how he plans to do that. “I want to become the best vibe coder in the world,” he adds. That’s his new North Star.

The future that 0xDesigner imagines is one he believes is inevitable. “There’s a whole new Internet being built right now, and I know there’s a right form factor for it,” he says. “I just want to know I played a part.” It’s a belief that we all deserve better tools—and a conviction that good design, like good writing, is its own form of authorship. 

It turns out, a pseudonym can sometimes reveal more than a name ever could. Maybe the boldest kind of visibility isn’t being seen, but being understood — not for who you are, but for what you create. 

Maybe one day, I just might be brave enough to try it.

Follow @0xDesigner on X and Farcaster for his latest tips on vibe coding, and explore his Design Everydays series on designeverydays.com.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected 0xDesigner's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

If you are wondering why you are receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

If you no longer wish to receive personal updates or writing from Debbie, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings ❤

The same can’t be said for the deep scar on the inside of my left leg. Once an epidermal cyst, it had to be surgically removed, leaving behind a gaping hole that slowly filled itself in with flesh. A healing that began, but never quite finished. I’ve thought about asking my surgeon to take another look, but after ten years of putting it off, I’ve learned to live with its glaring imperfection. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.

The quiet truth is: both the finger and the leg are outward signs of a shadow I’ve carried for as long as I can remember. My earliest, sharpest memory is of sitting in the church pews at twelve, restless and obsessed with the hair growing out of that one finger. Just that finger, and no other. And so began the ritual. For the next twenty years, I plucked at it. I’d run it against my lip, so sensitive now it can detect even the softest, finest strand. With or without tweezers, I’d squeeze, scrape, dig until it was gone. Even now, I feel a small wave of pride whenever I win the battle against a single stubborn hair.

My leg followed the same story. It started with a single ingrown hair. But over time, I fought it so hard it became something else entirely – a lump of trauma turned pulsating flesh. A swollen, throbbing growth that begged to be cut out of me.

Lately, I’ve been wrestling with the shape of anxiety. How much of it is as real as the scars I carry? And how much of it is just me feeling more than I need to, aching more than the moment calls for? But then again, isn’t that also the gift? To feel life so fully, so fiercely, that it reverberates through your entire body in a way that is impossible to fight.

Medically, I have a diagnosis: my psychiatrist says I have generalized anxiety disorder with a side of mild to moderate depression. I take one milligram of Clonazepam and ten milligrams of Doxepin every night, just to give myself a shot at six hours of sleep. Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine – the same family as the better-known Xanax, though supposedly less addictive with a longer half-life. Doxepin is a tricyclic antidepressant, the kind that’s supposed to nudge your serotonin levels back up toward normal.

The rows of amber prescription bottles in my cabinet should make it all feel real, right? And yet, my rudimentary understanding of how the American healthcare system works only leads to an underlying distrust that makes me second guess it all.

The truth is, all this feels like a dark dirty secret. On the outside, I’m sure it seems like I lead a charmed life. That’s what social media is for, isn’t it? Highlight reels, not hidden bruises. Gloss over grit.

No one sees the moment I pause at the “emergency contact” field of a form, unsure who to write down. What use is a name if they’re 10,000 miles and 12 time zones away? Or the way comparison whispers when I realize how far I’ve fallen behind my peers financially, choosing passion over paycheck again and again, in a wandering pursuit of purpose. A purpose I can only loosely define by the idea of impact. And maybe hardest of all: the grief of recently deciding to do life alone, even as my heart longs to stay open. Even as it fears all the times it has broken and the times it has yet to.

Yet to live with such agency is to live with privilege. Every tension my mind tangles itself in is a choice willingly made. Sometimes the dissonance is so quiet it’s deafening. Other times, it’s so loud it’s a hum only I can hear.

Today, I still pick at my finger. It soothes my nerves for a moment until I break the skin open and whisper, “why Debbie, not again”.

I keep most of it to myself. Even when a tear escapes as I walk down the streets of Manhattan, I wipe it away with the haste of a passing train, thankful that my Tarte eyeliner stays on as advertised.

Then there are nights when it breaks through. I curl into a ball, knees to chest, sobbing into a pillow as I repeat like a chant “I just want to go home”, even though I no longer know where home is. These are the hardest spells. The ones that turn tears into nausea, nausea to a coughing fit, until I’m gasping for breath in a room no one has the key to.

Still I ask myself, again and again, how much of this is real? How much of this is imagined pain dressed as romanticized distress? Am I the damsel tucked away from view, or the queen who steps into daylight, poised and in control? Is someone out there meant to save me or have I been the heroine of my own story all along?

Only time will tell. Until then, I soldier on. Pills in hand, and a kind of determination louder than any cry could ever be.

NFTs were my real entry point into crypto in 2021. They turned me into something I never imagined I’d become: an art collector.

Growing up, I thought “collector” was a word reserved for the wealthy. People with wine cellars, white walls, and gallery relationships. But then I bought my first NFT, and everything changed. Suddenly, I wasn’t just appreciating art… I was owning it. Supporting it. Sharing in something alive and evolving.

Today, I collect both physical and digital pieces. I have a collection I’m proud of that lives across both spaces. I’ve also commissioned works from artists I deeply admire – sometimes for myself, sometimes for the people I love.

But maybe more important than any piece I’ve collected is this.

After working with tens of thousands of artists at HUG, I found myself leaning into my very own “artist’s way.” I’ve put plenty of photography and writing onchain. I’ve found a surprising creative rhythm in poetry. I’ve fallen into vibe coding – tiny tools and interactions that blur the line between play, art, and code.

When I joined Privy, I was excited from day one.
But a part of me was nervous.

After spending the past four years advocating for artists, working with galleries and curators, would people see this as a departure? How do you go from building a creative community to building infrastructure (which, let’s be honest, sounds yawn in comparison) – one that powers how money moves on the internet?

The thing is, infra doesn’t scream emotion the way art does.
But it is just as fundamental.

Because the truth is, I’ve watched artists and platforms struggle – not for lack of talent or originality, but because the systems around them haven’t kept up.

Just look at:

1. Efdot's whose upcoming collab with 0xdiid, CITIES, launches on Art Blocks June 16. It’s a generative collection about urban sprawl and emergence: code that behaves like cities themselves.

   

2. Adamtastic, whose work continues to evolve. This year’s pieces feel bolder, more emotive, yet still unmistakably his in color and movement.

   

3. Gina Choy, an academically trained fine artist and PhD research scholar, whose work draws inspiration from nature as the algorithm on both canvas and code. She will be having her solo show in New York from June 21-23, and I can't wait to see her best works on display.

   

4. Joelle LB quietly crafting ToveSkargard, an AI-driven collection experimenting with dithering and texture. It’s both eerie and intimate, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

   

The creativity is there. The work is brilliant.
What’s missing is reach. Velocity. Conversion.

We’re simply not bringing in enough new collectors, fast enough.

That’s the root of the problem, and the part I’m now trying to help solve.

At Privy, we’re obsessed with making crypto feel… invisible. Seamless.
Because we know what the tech can do. Most people just don’t know how to use it.

But if we make it easier to own a wallet, we make it easier to own art.

If we can make stablecoin not just a form of payment but a way of life (frictionless, familiar, and flexible), then maybe we turn more art lovers into collectors.
More appreciation into participation.
More observers into patrons.

Because that's exactly how I got here.
Four years ago, I was just someone who loved art.
And someone made it easy for me to buy my first NFT.
I've not looked back since.

So this is a love letter... but it’s also a commitment.
To the artists who keep showing up.
To the collectors who may not know they’re collectors yet.
To everyone building the tools that make the culture flourish.

Growing the internet economy means many things.
But I hope it means this, too:
That artists win. That creativity thrives.
That we stay in it, together.

Onward, I love you all so much. ❤

Ted (Not Lasso) is part of the team building Farcaster, a decentralized social network. Before joining officially, she was a longtime power user, known for her thoughtful commentary, approachable onboarding, and deep commitment to community. Prior to Farcaster, she worked in DeFi and consulting. She’s also the Season 3 winner of Crypto: The Game, the onchain survival reality competition.

Miley Cyrus’ pop hit “Party in the U.S.A” opens with: I hopped off the plane at LAX / with a dream and a cardigan. For those of us who frequently fly through the Los Angeles International Airport, we can’t help but chuckle. Navigating the chaos of LAX, especially the infamously inconvenient LAX-it rideshare pickup point, is hardly the stuff dreams are made of.

And yet, for so many of us who have chosen to call LA home, that’s exactly what it is. Ted and I included.

Before Ted made LA her home, she came from further east. Born the second of four kids in a tight-knit family in Connecticut, Ted has always known herself to be outgoing and endlessly curious. “My mom told me that I had never met a stranger I wasn’t curious about,” Ted laughs.

Despite having wide-ranging interests, from reading to sports to dance, Ted was most inspired by her grandfather – a thoughtful, brilliant, and wonderfully goofy medical doctor whose humanitarian work brought him as far as Africa. “My grandfather was my absolute hero,” Ted says. “Becoming a doctor was my number one goal for the longest time.”

And for years, that’s exactly what she worked toward. Ted threw herself into four intense years of pre-med, studying everything from molecular biology to neuroscience. But while waiting to hear back from med schools, she made an unexpected decision: she moved to Barcelona to play for a professional women’s water polo team.

There, in a new city where she barely spoke the language, Ted picked up some light consulting work through a friend. And somewhere between the chlorine, the Catalan, and the quiet space away from a life she thought she wanted, something shifted. She realized she didn’t actually want to go back to school. More importantly, she realized she didn’t need to become a doctor to help people, or to scale the kind of impact she’d always dreamed of making.

Even as she packed her bags to leave Barcelona, Ted knew there was one thing she couldn’t give up: the Mediterranean weather. LA, with its endless stretch of 72-and-sunny days, felt like it had her name written all over it.

Once in LA, Ted joined a boutique consulting firm, where a celebrity client had just received a million-dollar crypto donation. With no one on the team knowing what to do with it, this prompted Ted’s first (and unexpected) deep dive into crypto. “We scrambled to find a lawyer who specialized in crypto, which was basically impossible at the time,” Ted recalls. “Meanwhile, I was just trying to wrap my head around what crypto even was.”

Ted eventually figured it out. She didn’t just learn what crypto was—she began to get excited about what it made possible. That curiosity led her to Morgan Stanley, where she helped pitch clients on adding Bitcoin exposure to their portfolios. But instead of feeling like she was at the forefront of financial innovation, she found herself disillusioned.“Because of all the regulations at the time, the product was only available to clients with assets of over three million dollars,” she explains. To Ted, institutional gatekeeping felt fundamentally at odds with what crypto promises, that is to fix broken systems and achieve greater financial inclusion. 

So, in 2020, Ted officially made the leap into crypto, joining a decentralized finance company called Goldfinch. Often shortened to DeFi, decentralized finance refers to peer-to-peer financial transactions that happen directly on the blockchain, without banks or intermediaries. That year, the space saw a surge in adoption during what became known as “DeFi Summer”, a breakout moment for crypto’s potential beyond speculation.

At Goldfinch, Ted worked on bringing private credit onchain – mission-driven work that felt both impactful and intellectually rewarding. But as the market started to cool, she also began to see the friction points firsthand: the sky-high cost of transactions (at a time when Layer 2 solutions did not exist at scale), and the steep difficulty of onboarding new users. “I found the user experience so fractured, both as an actual user and as someone building in the space,” Ted adds.

Ted had always been full of questions, and as the crypto space evolved, so did her quest for knowledge. Even then, she steered clear of Crypto Twitter. Having spent time representing clients and working at Morgan Stanley, she remained hyper-aware of what she posted online.

All that changed thanks to a serendipitous connection. Her boyfriend at the time had gone to school with Dan Romero, one of the founders of Farcaster. After running into Dan and learning he was building a “decentralized Twitter,” her boyfriend passed the news along. “My boyfriend didn’t really get it,” Ted recalls, “but he immediately thought it sounded like something I’d be into.”

Since Dan was personally onboarding every new user to Farcaster, Ted had to keep (not so) subtly nudging her boyfriend to ask again. “I wasn’t begging,” she laughs, “but I was definitely like, ‘Soooo… talked to Dan lately?’” Eventually, she scored herself an invite, bypassing the white-glove onboarding and sneaking in with an invite code of her own. Ted’s Farcaster ID is 259, making her the 259th user to join the decentralized social network, which now boasts nearly a million users.

Once on Farcaster, Ted quickly found herself getting answers to every crypto-related question she had. These high quality responses were also coming from industry veterans, including early Coinbase employees. But what struck her wasn’t just the access to knowledge, but the values of the community. “People actually believed in decentralization,” she says. “Not just as a way to make money, but as a way to build a better Internet.” Curious to meet the humans behind the avatars, Ted showed up to her first community meetup, where to everyone’s surprise, she turned out to be a woman.

It wasn’t long before Ted became a real power user. One of the first to post content unrelated to crypto, she also took it upon herself to report product bugs directly to the team. “I joined Farcaster when there was no mobile app,” she recalls. “You couldn’t even see who liked your posts.” She was also added to an early auto-follow list, a now-retired feature designed to help seed the social graph.

Ted may have the auto-follow list to thank for her early numbers, but the community she’s nurtured since then is entirely her own. “I started to wonder… out of all the people who followed me—whether by choice or by default—who’s actually still here, and who actually cares?” Ted says.

That question led to the creation of Club Ted. “I wanted to do something small and fun with people who genuinely wanted to get to know each other,” Ted says. She floated the idea quietly, telling just a few people. One of them was Johnny Mack (@nonlinear.eth on Farcaster), who happened to be building Hypersub, an onchain membership platform that provided the tools for Club Ted to take shape. With membership capped at 69, it quickly became a token-gated sanctuary where people connected over learning, support, and shared curiosity. 

That same passion for community led Ted to spearhead the first large-scale (but second-ever) FarCon, Farcaster’s community-run conference in Venice, California. “We thought maybe 150 people would come,” she says. “But 300 signed up before we even finalized the venue.” Keeping things to one intimate location to avoid the usual chaos of crypto events, Ted eventually pulled it off with help from her mom and sister, all while juggling a full-time job. “More than anything, I wanted to make space for everyone, even those who’d only just joined Farcaster,” she adds.

With Ted as one of Farcaster’s most visible champions, it’s no surprise many assumed she already worked there. Those who knew she didn’t just kept asking Dan to hire her. Ted made a case of her own too—showing she could contribute meaningfully by organizing and coordinating a Developer Day for 80 builders. Yet for months, Dan remained steadfast in hiring only technical roles.

That changed at the end of January, when he finally reached out. “Dan told me they were going to take a really big swing this year,” Ted says. “And said that we’re going to go big or go home, and would love to see if you’d be interested in joining the team.”

The answer was an obvious yes. While joining the team felt like a dream, it didn’t come without a reality check. “It’s one thing to be a power user with frustrations and feature requests,” Ted explains. “It’s another to be on the inside, seeing firsthand the constraints, tradeoffs, and ruthless prioritization it takes to actually build something that works.” 

Though Ted believes Farcaster’s greatest retention engine is its community, she’s under no illusions about the challenge ahead. “It’s both fun and insanely hard,” she adds. “You realize just how steep the climb is to make consumer crypto work. But being part of such a focused and passionate team makes it all feel worthwhile.”

As FarCon enters its third year, this time in New York City, the Farcaster ecosystem feels stronger than ever, both in community and in product. Farcaster Mini Apps (formerly known as Frames) have opened up entirely new ways to build social experiences onchain. Warpcast now includes its own embedded wallet (affectionately dubbed the “Warplet”), and the Farcaster feed is being integrated directly into the new version of Coinbase Wallet—bringing millions closer to seamless onchain connection.

But for Ted, it’s still the values that matter most. Farcaster, to her, remains one of the most intellectually curious, civil, and genuinely fun corners of the internet. She also believes it to be the healthiest way to engage with social media, and is proof that community, when designed with care, can be more than noise.

The road to 100 million users is still long. But like her television namesake said: “I believe in hope. I believe in belief.” Ted does. The Farcaster team does. And if you’re casting, building, or simply showing up, you probably do too.

Farcaster is a decentralized social network. Anyone can join the community and get started by downloading Warpcast from the App Store or the Google Play Store.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected Ted's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

If you are wondering why you are receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

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Betty is the CEO and co-founder of DFZ Labs, the tech, media, and gaming company behind the NFT project Deadfellaz and digital asset verification tool Coldlink. A celebrated thought leader in blockchain, Betty has become a go-to resource for traditional brands entering the crypto space and is a vocal champion for creator inclusivity on a global scale.

I love body art. At last count, I have twelve tattoos—each one marking a meaning, a memory, or a moment—some significant, others spontaneous. One of them I got in Downtown Los Angeles during a community event hosted by the NFT project Deadfellaz. Across from me, in an identical black chair, sat its founder Betty—needle buzzing as she etched the project’s iconic logo into a small patch of bare skin, the only untouched spot on an otherwise ink-covered arm.

Some people say tattoos are the stories of your heart written on your skin. For Betty, this moment marked a quiet, permanent vow to a loud, defiant belief she has poured her soul into, alongside her partner in both business and life, Psych.

While the story of Deadfellaz started a mere four years ago, Betty’s and Psych’s began decades earlier. Betty spent the first fifteen years of her life in a small village in Yorkshire, England, before moving 10,000 miles across the world to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Any move at that age, away from close-knit family and friends,  is a shock to the system. But it wasn’t long before Betty found a confidante, a creative counterpart, and her future husband at a high school party. “We’ve really grown up together,” she says, with a smile.

Raised by a thrash metal musician father and a high-achieving nurse for a mother, Betty recalls her formative years as being equally shaped by academia, adventure, and creativity. On one hand, she was deep into musical theater while trading Pokémon cards until she reached the pinnacle of owning three holographic Charizards. On the other, she was pursuing a biomedical science degree, aspiring to follow closely in her mother’s footsteps. It wasn’t until a childhood friend from England passed away from cancer that Betty paused to ask which part of herself she felt most called to.

Together, she and Psych decided that such a decision was best made through a fresh lens, and in an entirely new environment. They packed their bags and moved to Montreal, Canada, armed with little more than youth, dreams, and a high school level of French proficiency—which, as Betty soon realized, was a far cry from Quebecois once she got there. Still, it wasn’t enough to hold them back from building a life together.

Montreal became the first of many stops on Betty and Psych’s journey to cementing a professional partnership on top of their personal one. Within a few years, they not only got married, but became business partners in a full-stack creative agency, where they worked on global events as large as the Olympics. That working relationship quickly came with added responsibility, as they welcomed the first of their three children—all while continuing to bounce between Australia and whatever global destination was calling their name.

While Betty and Psych’s way of raising a family between different countries was somewhat unconventional, it worked for them—and they were happy. That is, until Betty was diagnosed with a severe form of nausea and vomiting known as hyperemesis during her third pregnancy. “My condition was so bad that I had to stop working. I couldn’t even look after my other kids properly,” Betty recalls.

After finally receiving the treatment she needed and delivering safely, disaster struck again—this time in the form of Australia’s devastating 2019–2020 bushfire season, one of the most catastrophic in the country’s history. “Our whole town was on fire,” Betty tells me. “We were evacuated twice and spent many nights staying up, listening to the radio in case we had to leave quickly.” 

As if 2020 couldn’t get any worse, the global pandemic hit shortly after. Betty and Psych were raising two young children and a newborn in lockdown, while client work began to dry up. Exciting global campaigns were replaced by far less inspiring projects focused on workplace health and safety. And yet, in what felt like a year of unrelenting despair, the couple managed to find a glimmer of hope—through an old friend they had first met in Montreal.

That friend was artist Justin Maller, founder of the digital art collective Depthcore, which Psych had joined years earlier. It was through the Depthcore artist community that they were first introduced to NFTs, as several members prepared drops on the then-emerging platform Nifty Gateway. Before long, Betty and Psych were glued to Clubhouse, soaking up conversations about the burgeoning world of crypto art and digital ownership. “Seeing how people were forming communities and building in crypto was just really exciting and cool,” Betty says, “especially compared to the alternative of depressing Covid-related news.”

While Betty quickly recognized the potential blockchain technology had to build more equitable financial and creator ecosystems, it took time for her to feel completely at home. “Today—and even in my day-to-day life—I’m not known as someone who’s afraid to talk,” Betty laughs. “But back then, I just didn’t see anything in Web3 that felt like it was for me.” It wasn’t until months later, when she came across a Twitter Space hosted by artists Ed Balloon and Brittany Pierre for the queer BIPOC community, that she finally felt welcome.

As Betty continued her onchain journey, she became captivated by the way communities were forming around the rise of PFP projects. “The way people were going wild and talking about traits felt like an amalgamation of everything I’d been interested in my whole life,” Betty says. It may have been years, but her Pokémon collector’s mindset was still alive and well. And with Psych being both an incredible artist and longtime business partner, Betty spotted an immediate opportunity to bring a PFP collection of their own to life.

“We wanted to pour everything we loved into one collection, and we happen to be huge horror fans,” Betty explains, about the brand’s origins. When designing the collection’s traits, she was also deliberate about creating gender-ambiguous characters—something that was rare at the time. Most collections either pandered to a male audience or included only a handful of female traits, often reduced to heteronormative symbols like lipstick or hair bows. “I wanted anyone and everyone to feel represented in the Deadfellaz collection,” she adds.

And while the collection ended up including hundreds of traits, none is more recognizable than the Betty trait, naturally inspired by Betty herself. Not only was the PFP that Psych designed for her the very first one she ever used (prior to that, she went simply by a Lisa Simpson avatar), it has also become one of the most recreated PFPs in the crypto space. “To see so many people creating fan art and their interpretation of Betty is so humbling,” she says. “While my PFP does represent me and who I am, I’d like to think it also stands for something bigger like what it means to be fearlessly yourself.”

There was never any doubt in Betty’s mind that Deadfellaz would be met with success. “I knew what we had built was special,” she tells me. “I hadn’t seen anything like this, and I knew that if I wanted it to exist in the world, so would a lot of other people.” What Betty and Psych hadn’t counted on was those people including celebrities like actor Elijah Wood, best known for playing Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, and NFL wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.

Over the next year, it felt like Deadfellaz could do no wrong. The brand inked a series of high-profile partnerships, from signing with talent agency UTA to teaming up with hardware wallet Ledger and global denim giant Wrangler.

But even Deadfellaz wasn’t spared when the bear market hit and NFT marketplaces began to phase out secondary royalties. “Like many other teams, we had to downsize massively,” Betty says. “It was sobering and heartbreaking to let go of people I loved, but we knew we had to take drastic measures for the company to survive in such crazy and unpredictable times.”

Those hard decisions have since proven to be the right ones. In the years that followed, Betty and Psych kept their heads down, quietly evolving Deadfellaz from a community formed around a PFP into DFZ Labs, a company with multiple verticals—including a trading card game (TCG) which is currently in early testing and now, Coldlink: a first-of-its-kind verification tool reimagining how digital assets can be accessed and used. Betty is equally excited about the potential of both.

“Gaming is literally in Psych’s DNA,” Betty explains. “He’s been designing games ever since I knew him, so to see him thrive and work to bring his ideas to life alongside a team of incredible engineers is just fantastic.” While Betty is tight-lipped over the launch details of their TCG, she could not be prouder to unveil their latest project: Coldlink, which she calls “the most exciting thing we’ve ever worked on as a team.”

Simply put, Coldlink is a universal collector. Blockchain-agnostic, Coldlink allows users to link their wallet address to just about anything—onchain or offchain—without needing smart contract approvals or risky site connections. That includes everything from social media and gaming handles to NFC chips and even concert ticket serial numbers. 

As ownership of digital assets continues to grow (think: memberships, gaming skins, digital collectibles), Coldlink opens the door to a wider range of token-gated rewards and experiences, without the need for one to connect or expose their wallet. “There are so many hurdles to real interoperability today,” Betty says. “But with Coldlink, we can tear down those walls and let people have fun—unlocking the craziest possibilities with the things they already own.”

With Psych by her side and three beautiful children, Betty already feels like she’s won the game of life. And yet, with Coldlink’s public beta now live, she’s more driven than ever to help shape the future of crypto. “I know I have the ability to create, to change, and to be part of something much bigger than myself,” she says. “And that is this industry.”

And just as her tattoos tell the story of who she is, Betty is now etching her biggest chapter into the very fabric of the Internet—leaving a mark not just on her skin, but on the entire world.

Coldlink is currently in beta, with support for Ethereum and Solana. New L1, L2, and app integrations are rolling out weekly. Developers can access the API and documentation at coldlink.xyz.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected Betty's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

If you are wondering why you are receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

If you no longer wish to receive personal updates or writing from Debbie, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings ❤

Winny, also known as Winny.eth, is the founder of Chipped, an innovative press-on nail brand embedded with NFC chips for seamless digital connections. With a background in fashion and blockchain technology, she bridges physical self-expression with onchain identity, redefining how we connect in the digital age.

The 2024 Paris Olympics gave us several unforgettable moments… and memes—one no more memorable than Sha’Carri Richardson’s stare-down as she sprinted towards the finish line. In that moment, Sha’Carri secured gold for Team USA in the women’s 4x100m relay, became the literal face of American track and field, and scripted her ultimate redemption arc. Just three years prior, she had been banned from the Tokyo Olympics after testing positive for marijuana.

Sha’Carri is an icon—not just because of her blazing speed (her 100m time is 10.7 seconds) but because she brings her full, unapologetic self to the track. Beyond her signature glam and swagger, she’s known for her elaborate 3-inch nails—each set intricately designed and often adorned with gemstones or dangling charms. Her nails, she says, reflect whatever mood she’s feeling on the day.

We may not all be Olympic gold medalists, but thanks to Winny and her brand, Chipped, we can all channel a little Sha’Carri energy of our own. Chipped is press-on nails with a techie twist. Each set comes embedded with an NFC chip, allowing the wearer to effortlessly share their contact details and links with a simple tap on a smartphone. Despite just being over a year old, Chipped has already been endorsed by luxury marketplace Gilt and even the queen of slay herself, Paris Hilton.

Chipped looks and feels like a product for everyone, because it is. Yet, behind its bold, hyper-feminine branding, it is one big Trojan horse into the world of crypto. On the surface, it’s a stylish networking tool that serves as a conversation starter. Under the hood, it is about unlocking the power of onchain identity—paving the way for proof of personhood, proof of attendance, and verifiable digital and in-person interactions in an era where distinguishing between real and fake is harder than ever. While Forbes, Marie Claire, and other mainstream outlets have raved about Chipped, the brand has also become a staple at every major crypto conference over the past year. After all, if you are a blockchain protocol that actually cares about bringing more women into crypto, what better way than to do so through press-on nails? Just ask Aztec, Cyber, and Espresso, who have all commissioned custom designs through Chipped.

But a love for nail art isn’t all that Winny has in common with Sha’Carri Richardson. She too is unapologetically herself and unafraid to show it. 

Unlike most crypto founders who hide behind avatars, Winny is front and center—posting hot takes, videos, and candid reflections on her founder journey. “If you’re passionate about what you’re building, you should have an opinion on it,” she says. “As a founder, if you’re uncomfortable with putting yourself out there, it’s simply an excuse for being scared that your product just isn’t good enough.”

Luckily for Winny, she couldn’t care less what other people think. Growing up with her mother as her swim coach, why would a few harsh words from strangers on the Internet faze her? While that part of her upbringing clearly shaped her, she otherwise considers her childhood in Guernsey—an island in the English Channel with a population of just 60,000—largely normal. If anything, being the middle child between two brothers made her exceptionally comfortable in male-dominated environments—a skill that would later serve her well in crypto.

Yet it was her seamstress grandmother who left perhaps the deepest of impressions. Once she received her first sewing machine at age 9, Winny was determined to work in fashion. “I had a goal of wanting to intern for Jeremy Scott, and I wrote it on my mirror at age 11,” Winny recalls. Less than a decade later, she manifested that exact dream, as she went on to pursue an undergraduate degree in fashion design and ended up landing an internship in New York City with Aeffe, the fashion house behind Moschino, where Scott was creative director.

Ironically, after chasing her childhood dream, reality was far more sombering. “I ended up not liking fashion as an environment at all,” Winny admits. “You had to constantly explain and justify your creative decisions, and that’s not how my brain works… I just design what comes to mind.” Living on $50 a week as a struggling intern in New York, Winny soon found herself drawn to an unlikely new crowd—a bunch of crypto-mining fraternity brothers from Yeshiva University who had discovered a new and novel way to make some extra cash.

When Winny returned to the UK, crypto was all that was on her mind. Despite briefly stepping away from fashion school, she eventually completed her degree, even going as far as to write her undergraduate thesis on how blockchain could revolutionize supply chain tracking in fashion. And while we have since seen luxury brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton embrace blockchain technology, Winny’s thesis at the time in 2019 was nothing more than pure hypotheticals. “My professor called it the dumbest thing he had ever read,” she recalls.

Yet, Winny remained undeterred. “For the first time in my life, I wanted to reinvent myself,” she says. Over the next few years, Winny committed herself to crypto—from taking coding bootcamps to diving headfirst into Crypto Twitter behind a pseudonymous persona (that’s right, Winny is not her real name). She eventually went on to found Shillr, a Web3 marketing agency, alongside four pseudonymous co-founders. “We didn’t know each other’s real names. We never even got on a video call,” Winny laughs. “We just trusted each other, and it could have all gone horribly wrong.”

Despite working on a number of meaningful projects at Shillr, Winny eventually found herself getting pulled to what is now termed “consumer crypto”—crypto applications designed for everyday users rather than traders or developers.. That turning point came when she collaborated with motion graphics artist Jess Wiseman (whose clients include the likes of Doja Cat and Jack Harlow) on an NFT project they showcased at ComplexCon. “People were drawn to our work because they loved how it looked, not because it was an NFT,” Winny explains. “From there, I saw so much opportunity to build products that were fun-first, without the need for anyone to know it had anything to do with crypto.”

That realization—combined with Winny’s growing frustration over the clunky process of exchanging contact details and scanning endless QR codes at crypto conferences—eventually led to Chipped. Then, one day as she was scrolling TikTok, she started to come across videos of women embedding NFC chips into their manicures.

And there it was: Chipped’s lightbulb moment. Why not create high-quality press-ons with built-in NFC chips, so anyone could achieve a flawless manicure from home? Why not build an app to store and track connections effortlessly? And why not put it onchain, making the data 100% verifiable and truly yours?

Today, people in crypto can’t stop talking about Chipped. But with NFC technology already being used for everything from payments to hotel keys, it’s only a matter of time before tap-to-connect nails become as common as Apple Pay. It is also why Winny remains laser-focused on everyday consumers who know nothing about blockchain. “There’s a ceiling when it comes to crypto, especially women in crypto,” Winny says. “I think crypto as an industry tends to overcomplicate things. At the end of the day, people just want to have fun.”

So far, Winny’s thesis is proving right. Chipped’s New York Fashion Week pop-up drew lines around the block. Paris Hilton included it in the PR Kit for her latest music video, Adored. And yet, Winny insists this is just the beginning. “You’ll soon be able to do more than just share links and contact information,” Winny teases, without giving too much away.

Who knows? Perhaps the next time we see Sha’Carri Richardson in the Olympics, she’ll be sporting a set of Chipped nails—taking proof of gold from the podium to the blockchain.

Interested in trying on a set of Chipped nails yourself? You can shop a variety of designs and lengths at chippedsocial.com.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected Winny's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

If this is your first time receiving this newsletter, it is because you were previously a part of the HUG community founded by Debbie Soon, which has since been acquired by .ART.

If you no longer wish to receive personal updates or writing from Debbie, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings ❤

Dylan Abruscato is the Emmy-nominated founder of Crypto: The Game, a viral crypto reality competition where players vote each other out for a winner-takes-all prize. The game was acquired by Uniswap Labs in 2024. Previously, he helped HQ Trivia reach a live audience of 2.4 million players and led marketing and partnerships teams at Uber, Postmates, and Party Round. Dylan began his career at Saturday Night Live and now lives in California with his wife and young son.

It was a chilly January evening in Los Angeles in 2018. I was sitting in the lobby of the Andaz West Hollywood, stunned beyond belief. After months of playing HQ Trivia religiously, I had finally answered all 12 questions correctly—winning the viral live trivia game show for the first time. The prize money was a few paltry dollars, well below the cash-out minimum, but it didn’t matter. The euphoria of beating out hundreds of thousands of players, coupled with hearing host Scott Rogowsky’s signature “Show me the money, baby!” is a feeling I’ll never forget.

Such is the magic of live, interactive entertainment when done right.

It’s that exact magic that Dylan Abruscato helped bring to life seven years ago as part of the HQ Trivia team. And now, he’s doing it all over again—this time, onchain—with his very own creation: Crypto: The Game, otherwise known as CTG. “HQ Trivia was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” Dylan recalls. “It was the most memorable stop in my career, and the most fun place I’ve ever worked.” And while HQ may be a thing of the past, Dylan is convinced he can combine his experience at HQ with his decades-long obsession with the reality TV show Survivor to create crypto’s next cultural phenomenon.

CTG is now entering its third season—Resurrection Island—a twist that lets eliminated players battle their way back into the game, just like Survivor’s Redemption Island or more recently, Top Chef's Last Chance Kitchen. For Dylan, who has watched every single season of Survivor since its premiere in 2000, CTG is a natural evolution of his lifelong passion.

“When Survivor first aired, I was in fifth grade, and I’d go to my best friend’s house to watch it every week,” Dylan tells me. “By college, I was recording episodes on my VCR and watching them after a night out at the bar.” His passion became so contagious that his college friends—who once made fun of him for it—became diehard fans themselves. Survivor fantasy leagues soon followed, and nearly 50 seasons later, Dylan’s love for the game hasn’t wavered.

Dylan’s career in live television began far from the world of blockchain. After hearing about NBC’s Page Program—a prestigious media rotational program—he applied and got in. “The application process felt like being on The Voice or American Idol, because I had to give a presentation to three senior NBC executives,” Dylan explains with yet another reality TV reference.

As an NBC Page, Dylan landed his dream assignment working on Saturday Night Live (SNL) Season 38, assisting a cast that included Jason Sudeikis, Fred Armisen, and Kate McKinnon. Spending time at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home to SNL, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and Late Night with Seth Meyers, deepened his love for live TV.

So when the opportunity to join HQ Trivia came along a few years later, it was a no-brainer. After all, he was already an avid player.

“This felt like the future of live TV,” he says. “The way HQ took a traditional game show format and made it live, mobile, and interactive, it felt like you could do the same for any TV competition—dating, talent, survival.” Of course, as a Survivor superfan, Dylan couldn’t resist pitching a Survivor-style game for HQ. But just like HQ’s creators were ahead of their time—they also founded short video sharing platform Vine well before TikTok gained mass popularity—they passed on the idea. Little did we all know that their loss would eventually become crypto’s gain.

Dylan first dipped his toe into crypto in 2017, buying modest amounts of Bitcoin and Ethereum. “I doubled my investment, sold, and thought I was the next Warren Buffett,” he laughs. “Looking back, it’s hard to think about what that would be worth now.”

But it wasn’t until the NFT boom that Dylan had his real "holy shit" moment.

An avid collector of anything and everything from baseball cards to Beanie Babies as a kid, Dylan immediately understood NFTs as digital collectibles. As he minted his first NFT—an Invisible Friends piece—he felt a familiar rush. “It was the exact same feeling as opening a pack of baseball cards,” Dylan says. “That anticipation of seeing what you got, and then deciding whether to trade, sell, or hold.” That’s when it clicked: crypto makes the Internet more fun.

While HQ had come and gone, Dylan found himself leading marketing at Party Round, a fintech startup building tools for founders raising capital. There, he began experimenting with viral onchain drops, including a CryptoPunk-inspired collection called Helpful VCs, which transformed investors like Ben Horowitz into pixel art characters. When Party Round got acquired, Dylan knew it was finally time to revive his old idea from HQ.

At the same time that Netflix’s dystopian survival thriller series Squid Game had taken the world by storm, Dylan saw an opportunity to turn his idea for a high-stakes, interactive survival game into reality—and convinced a few former Party Round colleagues, Tyler Cagle and Bryan Lee, to help build it.

While CTG wasn’t initially conceived as a blockchain game, Dylan quickly realized that crypto was the perfect fit. Firstly, with the team bootstrapping development, player entry fees were the only way to fund the prize pool—something crypto communities were more likely to be comfortable with. Further, having dealt with PayPal’s withdrawal minimums and transaction delays at HQ, Dylan saw crypto as a frictionless way to pay winners instantly. “I always told myself—if I ever built a game that paid out winners online, it would have to use crypto,” he added.

And just like that, Crypto: The Game was born. 

As a first-time founder, Dylan built CTG in public, leveraging his Twitter following of a few thousand. He posted a simple screen recording with the caption: “What if HQ Trivia and Survivor had a baby?” The tweet blew up instantly. Season 1 drew 410 players, including founders and investors from top-tier crypto VCs like Paradigm, Dragonfly, and a16z.

Dylan Abruscato

@DylanAbruscato

What if HQ Trivia and Survivor had a baby?

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12:33 PM • Dec 20, 2023

With the popularity and success of Season 1, Dylan had to move towards capping the number of entries for subsequent seasons at 800 players. “I was nervous that people wouldn’t like the idea of there just being one winner,” Dylan says. “But I have had hundreds of people tell me this is the most fun they have ever had online and onchain, and that CTG is well worth the price of admission.”

Season 2 saw deeper onchain integrations, including the ability to trade participation spots via NFTs. That inevitably also led to more brand partnerships from crypto-native companies. As decentralized exchange Uniswap started to explore a multiyear sponsorship, the opportunity arose for Dylan and CTG to officially join the Uniswap family. The synergies, while not immediately obvious, are now apparent. Season 3 is built on Unichain - a new Layer 2 network launched by Uniswap.

But despite CTG’s crypto roots, Dylan is careful not to force blockchain into the game. “My advice to any founder? Come up with the idea first, then decide if building it onchain makes for a more fun or better experience,” Dylan explains. “If we had started with ‘how do we make a crypto game’, we would never have had the success we did.” 

At the time of writing, CTG Season 3 already has 615 entries, just less than two days before tribes are assigned and the game officially begins. While it remains to be seen who will be crowned this season’s winner, Dylan has his sights set on future seasons, including international versions and adapting CTG’s live onchain formula to other reality game formats (think: The Amazing Race).

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my career,” Dylan says. “Because this is the game I’ve always wanted to play.” As CTG’s gamemaster and its own Jeff Probst, Dylan is still holding onto his ultimate dream—to compete on Survivor himself. In fact, he’s just submitted his casting application for the 10th season in a row.

But while Survivor’s casting is out of his hands, the beautiful and permissionless nature of crypto is that anyone can play—and anyone can win. The real question is: Will that be you?

Entry to Crypto: The Game costs 0.1 ETH (~$220) and is open until Monday, March 10, at 12 PM ET. Think you have what it takes to outwit, outplay, and outlast? Join Dylan and hundreds of other players on the island at cryptothegame.com.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected Dylan's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.