Solana’s last-year obsession with liquidity and purely financial markets is a creative and narrative failure dressed up as “maturity.” A bunch of “adults” got together in a room, as they always do, and decided the “kids needed to grow up.” To be clear, it worked. Solana ate market share, and now everyone is coming down from the “I’m sooooo right” high and chasing another. That’s not what I’m contesting. I’m contesting what it cost to get there, and what it crowded out. There is much grander work to be done than competing for perps market share, of which, less than 0.01% of people in the world will ever give a shit about. I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that blockchain is purely a financial tool. It is a communications of value tool, of which, finance is the strongest tool in the toolbox, sure. Making financial markets your primary narrative is to make meaninglessness your primary narrative. There is a reason NFTs kept people around, because, no matter how misguided or wrong, there was at least the assumption of actual meaning under the hood. The (wrong) cynic will have you believe that EVERYONE who came for NFTs came for the financial side of them. This is patently untrue, and, almost all of the people who ever arrived somewhere for $$$, left just as quickly when it made them feel correct. Look at @jords and @notcelon. Arguably some of the most important culture-movers in early Solana days, and most certainly reapers of its bounty. They now owe no loyalty to it because they could not stand to maintain or deal with the hardships of actually building a real community. They were able to walk away feeling right, perpetually correct even, and now feel vindicated in their opinions. Why? Because the words they speak on the X dot com are directionally accurate but ultimately hold no weight, they bear 0 consequence. They won and get to sit in the stands and complain about lame shit. (Sorry bros I love you and you bought me my first fancy Japanese whiskey as a very poor kid in Amsterdam and I shared a very good hug with @TheOnlyNom and carried a broken-angled Dutch woman to an uber because of it, but you really don’t have a horse in this race anymore, shh pls, it’s cringe asf). To be clear, this is not shade on them, most people are not cut out for it, especially when a “community” like BOOGLE is assembled almost exclusively for exclusivity and the associated price tag. Creating a moment doesn’t require the same determination a movement does. On the flip side, you have @vibhu, who, I always believe had his heart exactly in the right place when building put DRiP, but, clearly, is an introvert with a history in Silicon Valley, a place deeply bereft of human love and compassion. Ultimately he, and the ex-Solana BOOGLE “cabal” are now wasting time sacrificing valuable emotional energy (I too am a lil Pisces introvert) debating about a topic that does not progress the advancement of humanity really, at all, in any measurable way. Meanwhile I’m in debt, I run an 1/1 NFT project in an ecosystem that increasingly does not give a shit about me, or any of the artists like me, wondering what changed and why we now believe chasing such ignoble and utterly ignorable causes like perpetuals will ever matter to anyone in my life. (It won’t and the conversation is really vapid to watch) A long rant to say that it seems like everyone has given into cynicism and lost the plot. We used to believe in something, now we sit around watching mert and toly debating communism and capitalism from their (relative to me) ivory towers. Cute. When did we all collectively lose our imaginations and start chasing the tail of the largest successful competitors? When did we stop evaluating innovation on its impact on normal, everyday, people? Why is the priority now a bunch of stinky self-important dudes who sit behind a screen and set stops while providing nothing of value to the world?