In the last post I closed it with a plea for people to "use" TEIA's new features that are now coming online. I decided to do a follow-up on it to emphasize why this will be very important, especially in the upcoming months.
TEIA is one of - if not the only - place on the internet right now that has chosen to build its core parts of its infrastructure on the blockchain, from the top (governance, maintenance, open-sourced code), all the way down to the ground level (messaging, notifications, stats, events), to maintain its transparency on every level. There are some communities out there (like Decentraland) that are also run in a decentralized way, but nothing like TEIA, where we have taken the idea of it all the way.
But does anyone care? Right now, you have "top leaders" in the industry openly saying that "nobody cares about decentralization", destroying the narrative of what made people interested in the technology to begin with. If you're gonna run the core parts of a "crypto" project using bottlenecked servers - what's the point? You might as well just use your credit card, where you at least you know it works reliably. (And if you happen to get "rugged", the bank will reimburse you for your troubles.) Right now, cryptocurrencies are just a slower, more expensive, less secure, and less transparent version of what we already have - and the markets have made their sentiment about that very clear at this point, I think.
A lot of this is a matter of the industry not playing to the technology's strengths, and falling into old habits out of familiarity and convenience. Why would anyone opt to pay gas fees just to send a message or comment to someone, when they can do it for free with social media or email? Because it's on the blockchain - you can read it knowing that it's an immutable record with a clearly defined source that can neither be faked nor spoofed.
To be fair, not everyone is going to care - perhaps, not even most people out there, who have already given up on the idea that the internet could be made any better at this point. But there are a few out there that do care, and lots of circumstances and places in the world where the censorship-resistant nature of the technology is not only useful, but essential to have. It's better that we satisfy the needs of the niche users that actually care about this stuff and do it thoroughly - and do it well.
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs Don't Have Low Standards - It Has No Standards
I've been in crypto since 2013 and I'm well aware that there are DAOs and projects out there that have decentralized funding models - many of whom have much larger coffers and are perhaps more sophisticated than what Tezos has in many ways. But the reason why I've stuck with XTZ is because it has a product and community - which is based in art. (I've also stuck with Decentraland is also because they also have a product - which is the metaverse. Popular now? No. But it is at least something you can see and interact with.) A lot of other chains have money but nothing to sell, which ends up creating environments where money exists for its own sake and just runs around in circles. I pulled out of them because it was hard for me to see where any of all of that was going - financial institutions traditionally have been very bad at product building, after all. Using money to build things that are there to solely get more money...well, that starts to resemble a ponzi after a while and the people were not impressed, let's say.
So to me, it makes more sense to start where the people already are and build up from there. In earlier years of the crypto industry that sense of unity was there, when people were still in the mindset of WAGMI - We're All Gonna Make It. But ever since the hype cycle of 21', greed took over and much of that spirit has been lost and the community was fractured at every level. There's always political drama and stories of betrayal around these fragmentations of the community itself, but if the core parts of the system stays in tact, it can often be brushed off as incidental. But the problem of crypto itself (not just Tezos, but crypto as a whole) is a problem of standardization.
In an ideal world, Tezos, Bitcoin, Ethereum - every chain out there would be using the same metadata standards for NFTs, for example. The differences between the labels "date", "date of mint", "creation date" might sound like a small problem but when you have thousands of projects using different systems and standards all over the place, it destroys interoperability and silos every project into its own island, where the work created lives and dies in that one spot, never getting used anywhere. At this point, I've seen this pattern hundreds of times but it's sad to see every time, since people pour their blood, sweat, and tears into this stuff but the work itself has nowhere to go after the 1 person loses interest or funding runs dry. (Why the open-source model is so important for any industry to have, even when it's doing well.)
The reason why the internet became so ubiquitous is because there were non-profit entities (similar to TEIA) like ICANN and W3C that set these types of common sense standards, creating a shared language that made it easier for startups and companies to commercialize it in a competitive environment where the "rules" were transparent and clear. That is basically what didn't happen in the crypto/blockchain industry thus far - where every coin, every L2, every startup and user are using their own systems that don't talk to each other in any way. This is opposite of an network effect - it's the the sowing of chaos, which allows for predators and vultures to thrive on the corpses of projects that failed to survive on its own.
Back to the original point: why TEIA? Well, the NFT markets are pretty much in free fall right now, and many platforms are already closing up shop. Since there were no standards put in place to make it easier to maintain these works for the long term, many of them will likely just disappear, lost forever due to poor organization and documentation. If there are no agreed-upon standards to ensure the longevity of these works, they will simply disappear after a while, added to the pile of dead startups out there that failed to integrate itself as part of a greater whole.
But TEIA is different - while other platforms built their platforms around traditional startup models and weren't willing to share their efforts with others, TEIA has quietly been building its credibility as the "open-source" project of NFTs that is both a non-profit and community owned. In a few years, it may, in fact, be the only thing left standing - which actually opens up a path for it to be the one to set the standards around NFTs and its usage for other projects as well. This prospect, combined with the low prices of crypto right now, may actually be the best time to do it, in fact.
So again - usage of the platform itself will be key in the near future to see if this new model we're creating on TEIA is a viability or merely a pipe dream. Fees (controlled by a vote) go directly into the DAO's treasury, and the stats/numbers make it easier for the team to fundraise and receive donations - every bit of engagement counts. If we can reach self-sustainability, then things can go only up from there.
But we're kind of at a point where we have to walk our own path or basically quit - because it's becoming quite clear that just following what the "market leaders" are doing is getting us nowhere. We have to show people how it's done and lead by example - I see it as the only way this has any chance at this point - it's now or never, really.