Thread by @kaiynne

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of DeFi, NFTs, art and gaming lately. Putting my current thoughts into a thread…

The first thing I want to highlight is the difference between attention and impact. Many things that garner high attention are not impactful, think the latest marvel movie. While many things that are high impact get minimal attention, think novel mathematical proofs.

As excited as we have all been about DeFi the reality is that it falls into the category of finance, which is typically high impact but low attention. The one offsetting factor being that speculative manias are often high attention. As are market implosions.

Art and other forms of cultural expression are often high attention but low impact, typically their impact only grows with time, assuming they survive. A lot of important art was ridiculed or ignored by its contemporary audiences.

This is why I think NFTs and Gaming will get orders of magnitude more attention than DeFi over the next decade. Despite the fact that DeFi will transform and impact society to a much larger degree. The addressable attention market for games and entertainment is huge.

BUT here’s the kicker! High attention innovations can have a symbiotic relationship with high impact ones. See the internet and porn.

NFTs and crypto gaming will dwarf DeFi in terms of attention, but they both utilise the same underlying technology, so the massive attention that accrues will acts as a protective layer for both DeFi and NFTs as tens of millions of consumers demand access to Ethereum.

In a way it feels weird to me to be building in DeFi, I’ve been a musician my whole life and was in a band that played a over a hundred shows along the east coast when I lived in Boston. I’ve written a novel. Art is probably the most important thing in the world to me.

I was also a gamer for a long time, I am old enough to have had an Atari when I was ~4 (not sure what my dad was thinking) I was obsessed with river raid 🤷‍♂️. I’ve been into mmorpgs and dungeon hack games and RTS. Games are amazing.

The intersection of gaming and NFTs will be mind blowing. That combined with a Cambrian explosion of art in the form of NFTs will provide cover fire for the critical work of reinventing finance that DeFi has undertaken, in order to deliver more fair and open global markets.

This is ultimately why @illuviumio scares me. I don’t like to lose, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t dwarf @synthetix_io in attention. Which is super annoying to me because I’m extremely competitive.

But that attention will drive demand for the underlying technologies like Ethereum and eth based scaling solutions. Which ultimately is a good thing for the entire industry.