On the subway, I keep seeing another wave of PFP avatar-swap trends—complete with a membership group, offline tickets, and co-branded merchandise in one package... To be frank, it looks a lot like Web2 brand playbooks, except they’ve replaced the “in-group credential” with an on-chain image. I don’t object to long-term value, but it depends on whether you’re actually buying ongoing service or just a burst of attention—when the hype is over, what’s left?

What I care more about right now is: whether membership benefits can be clearly spelled out, whether wallet connections make you sign all kinds of strange permissions by default, and whether accounts can be recovered if you lose them (don’t laugh—some people really end up with nothing just because they change their phone). Recently, the arguments over privacy coins/mixing and compliance boundaries have been tearing things apart, and it also reminds me of this: the bigger the brand, the easier it is to be “under the magnifying glass,” and in the end the ones affected may be regular holders. Anyway, I’ll go slow—if I can use it, I’ll use it, and don’t treat “a sense of identity” as the asset itself.