I’ve been looking at the PFP/membership setup again, and the more I look, the more it feels like “emotional TVL.” To put it plainly: when the art looks good and the group chat is lively, people call it a brand. But once things go cold, even the avatar gets too lazy to change—what’s left is just a few hard-core fans hyping themselves.

This wave of social mining and fan tokens is even more outrageous: calling attention “mining,” and I can’t help but laugh… Attention is obviously valuable, but it’s too slippery—today it’s for you, and tomorrow it’s off chasing some other trending headline.

If, back then, a lot of projects had turned “tickets” into long-term entitlements (for example, actually being able to continuously share resources, getting priority offline, and governance that doesn’t let people slack off), rather than running tasks every day to surge the rankings, I probably wouldn’t have been so sarcastic. Anyway, for now I’ll just look at two fund-flow charts—once TVL drops, I start getting uneasy. That’s it for now.