I feel like you see the desire for this trustless ethos more now, with the stimulus checks, and people not having faith in the US economy. Like how the $DOGE army was inspired by the Covid crash; young people were emboldened with $2000 they previously didn’t have. 

Yes. So you wanted to talk about NFTs?

Of course. 

The first real NFT project I got into was Aavegotchi, which launched in March 2021 on Polygon, which was an early Layer 2 solution. Axie had been around already. The concept behind it required a lot of transactions; they were going to launch in January on ETH, but transaction fees were exorbitant at the time so they decided to delay and port the project over to Polygon. The protocol with Aavegotchi is gamified; you have to pet your “gotchi” every day to get a “kinship score.” What Pixelcraft, the team behind Aavegotchi, first did was launch a token, GHST (pronounced “ghost”). There’s a mathematical function, a bonding curve, that determines the price of the coin depending on supply. It’s a stable way to build a coin that lasts a long time, without much volatility. A big criticism of NFTs is that you don’t own the image; what you actually own, however, is the metadata. NFTs are just ownership stakes in a contract.

Like a deed.

Exactly. What you’re actually buying is membership into a club. You own a piece of a contract. All the details added on top can be changed at any point, including the image that it generates.

SW: So when people a year ago were screenshotting the Bored Ape NFTs and laughing about how people don’t actually “own” an NFT when they “own” it, they just didn’t really get it.

O: Yes. So what Aavegotchi did is build everything on the blockchain–no external servers necessary to generate the image for you. The reason why everyone doesn’t do that is because smart contract memory is limited and expensive, so you can’t physically store images. Aavegotchi uses an SVG, an old internet format for images, which is really lightweight. You get 8-bit graphics from it, but there’s no external storage needed.