Recently, I’ve been seeing a bunch of projects pushing PFPs/memberships again, and their slogans are pretty grand: brand, community, long-term value. To put it bluntly, a lot of the time it’s really about locking in “attention” first, and then waiting to see whether they can keep going once the hype fades. If it’s truly meant to be long-term, though, I care more about whether it can be tightly tied to the product experience—for example, this whole cross-chain/account abstraction setup: can memberships come with fewer signature pop-ups, less anxiety about authorizations, and not lose permissions just because someone’s lost the images… Otherwise, it’s like an annual gym membership card: you’re fired up when you sign up, but after a couple of visits it just gathers dust.

In the past couple of days, the mainstream public chains have been upgrading/maintaining, and the group chat has been speculating whether the ecosystem might migrate. I think whether they migrate or not depends on how high the “cost of moving users” is—no matter how strong the brand is, if the chain goes down, people will still run to somewhere that actually works. PFPs are more like door numbers; what can really hold up are the essentials—security, availability, and usability. Anyway, when I see “membership benefits” now, my first reaction isn’t to jump in. I ask one thing first: if I switch chains or switch wallets, will the benefits keep up? If not, then it’s just a sticker.