Looking back at 2021, a lot of people mock NFT purchases as "paying $200k for a picture of a monkey". It's true that in hindsight, you can remove all bias and see the action as it was - you sent $200,000 and they sent you a picture a monkey.

But I think we're being too hard on ourselves. In most of these cases, our buying was really motivated by three things: community, speculation, and earnest enjoyment of the asset/art. In hindsight we think only about the latter, especially when the communities fizzled and price went down (often hand in hand).

Like many, I really enjoyed participating in NFTs in 2021, and didn't pay much attention to ERC-20's. WIF single handedly flipped my interest. I became incredibly bullish on memecoins, for the same reasons I first liked NFTs - I saw that they were fun, that "number go up" is a great narrative, and that they would form great communities. I wasn't sure what would happen to the 10k PFP NFTs now that we had memecoins.

But a year after WIF's launch, a few things stand out to me: - memecoins have become arguably more saturated than NFTs ever were - memecoins have not built real, emotional communities - we haven't seen memecoins learn from NFT communities

What powered 2021 nft communities was that leaving the community, by selling or changing your PFP, hurt. It felt meaningful to enter and leave a community. People would welcome you into their world when you changed your PFP to their community, embodied by the (cringe) motto "apes follow apes".

With memecoins, you get basically none of these benefits. You buy $MEMECOIN and tweet about it a couple times. You maybe poke into the telegram, which is 99% spam. It goes up 2x or down 30% and then you sell some, either slowly or all at once. You stop talking about it, it fades away from your memory and you do it all again. Everything was in service of making money.

Not to says that nft communities don't have downsides - lack of liquidity and volume, high floor prices preventing easy access, wild volatility.

My thesis is that the best projects will combine both of these and focus on building real, emotional communities, which we still haven't seen this cycle. The % of people on CT who use an NFT as their profile picture is probably like 5% right now. In 2021 it was probably closer to 90%

We'll see memecoins gaining momentum, then community members (or the project runner) creating canonical NFTs which the community uses as PFPs. Group chats emerging from those owners. Maybe an AI agent in the mix.

This is why I'm super bullish on FWOG - you have a memecoin that allows anyone to join, an original IP, an amazing nft pfp collection (the Pond). Pillzumi has AI agents, great IP, a token, and I hope will eventually do PFPs.

I'd love to hear about other projects combining great IP, a memecoin, and NFTs.