On May 6, Indian fighter jets bombed Pakistani targets. The strike was retaliation for a terrorist attack in Kashmir, where non-Muslim civilians were executed point-blank. It was a brutal, sectarian killing.

India claimed complete operational success. Mission accomplished, terrorists killed, targets hit. But within hours, that version of the story began to collapse. Twitter, Discord, and OSINT researchers who were tracking the conflict started to share wreckage photos of what appeared to be downed aircraft on Indian soil. Pakistani officials went on CNN and claimed they had downed two jets. By sunset, Pakistan had raised that number to five.

Initially, casual observers did not take the Pakistani claims seriously. Both India and Pakistan are known for spinning baseless claims and propaganda to project strength. However, despite this, this time the evidence seemed to tilt in Islamabad’s favor.

By the next morning, multiple open-source analysts had confirmed that at least two Indian aircraft had been destroyed. Satellite imagery showed possible crash sites. Locals reported immediate lockdowns by Indian military convoys that had secured the crash sites within hours.

Multiple French intelligence officials confirmed to CNN immediately in the hours after the air conflict erupted that at least one of the downed aircraft was a French-manufactured 4.5th generation fighter aircraft, the Rafale F3R. Nearly three weeks later, the official line from the French government is that they are still “investigating” whether multiple Rafale aircraft were shot down, and have yet to issue a definitive public statement. India, for its part, has only now cautiously acknowledged losing aircraft in the conflict, but refused to specify how many or what type.

France sells the F3R under strict confidentiality agreements to customer-states that likely limits public disclosure. Even when the truth surfaces, it’ll be buried under diplomatic fog.

As the news spread, a much deeper question began to emerge...

How did Pakistan, a country in economic ruin with a defense budget roughly fifty times smaller than India’s, pull this off?

Short answer: they didn’t. Not on their own, at least. They had help… from China.

This Was a Proxy Demo

Pakistan’s military hasn’t been operating on its own for years. Up until 2010, its primary arms supplier was the United States. But after the Abbottabad raid in 2011, relations between the two countries began to deteriorate rapidly. By 2016, Washington had fully suspended arms sales to Pakistan. This created a vacuum, and China moved quickly to fill it.

Through a new initiative called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Beijing transformed Pakistan into a client state. The CPEC allowed China to dump billions into Pakistan in the form of economic aid, military assistance, infrastructure, and, most importantly, weapons.

China sold cutting-edge weapon systems to Pakistan, including J-10C fighters, PL-15E air-to-air missiles, electronic warfare suites, and armor. In exchange, China gained access to a strategic, nuclear-armed ally with a long, volatile border with India.

The recent modernization of Gwadar Port, in which China spent billions on upgrades, turning Gwadar from a modest commercial port into a massive deepwater facility with strategic reach, was part of this larger military calculus. China wasn't just investing in Pakistani infrastructure; it was co-opting it to guarantee its own national security.

And almost all of the Chinese technology Pakistan procured was on full display during the recent Kashmir conflict. China may not have been on the battlefield — but its weapons were. And they got the kind of field test against a NATO-grade platform that money simply could not buy.

At the center of the engagement from the Pakistani side was the Chinese J-10C — the export variant of one of China’s newer multirole fighters — facing off against India’s Rafale F3Rs, the crown jewel of the Indian Air Force and one of the most advanced NATO-grade aircraft currently in service. The F3R is frequently compared to the F-35 for its agility, targeting, and versatility — and yet, in this battle, it didn’t hold the advantage.

Pakistan and India exchanged missiles at ranges exceeding 100 kilometers. Nobody entered enemy airspace. Because of the nature of modern air combat, nobody needed to. That's where the Chinese-manufactured PL-15E hypersonic missile came in.

The PL-15E is the export variant of a much more capable domestic missile. It uses a dual-pulse engine, AESA radar, and has a range of 145km (the range of the domestic version is even longer at 300km). Once fired, it creates what defense analysts call a “No-Escape Zone” which almost guarantees a direct hit — regardless of how aggressively the enemy aircraft maneuvers or tries to evade.

For both the J-10C and the PL-15E, this was their first use in an active combat engagement. And the trial gave China exactly the validation it had been seeking: their J-10Cs had downed a top-tier NATO jet in real combat. Their system worked.

And Beijing was elated. According to a report from the Telegraph:

At 4am on Wednesday, China’s ambassador to Pakistan hurried to the foreign ministry to celebrate an unprecedented military success.

Pakistan had reportedly shot down several Indian aircraft in the hours before using Chinese J-10C fighter jets.

“Our jet fighters… shot down three Indian Rafales, three Rafales [that] are French,” Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s foreign minister, told parliament on Wednesday. “Ours were J-10C.”

The Chinese delegation, roused from their sleep by the outbreak of conflict between two nuclear-armed nations, was thrilled with the success of the Pakistani defence, Mr Dar said.

“Being a friendly nation, they expressed great happiness.”

This wasn’t just a battle. It was a live-fire demo. China didn't just sell Pakistan hardware. They were intimately involved in training their allies, helping them use their platforms, and now, as a result, have been able to prove reliably that their technology works against Western equivalents.

And this partnership seems to only be deepening. In the weeks since the air conflict ended, China has fast-tracked delivery of the eponymously named J35A stealth fighter, an aircraft that is vastly cheaper and has aggressively borrowed design cues and has similar capabilities to the US-made F-35.

India’s Mess Is the West’s Mirror

India is the largest importer of defense technology in the world, but its military procurement is an unmitigated disaster. Its arsenal is cobbled together from a dozen different countries — Russia, France, Israel, the U.S., Spain, and others. There’s no coherent doctrine, no standardized logistics, and no scalable domestic manufacturing. On paper, it looks like strategic diversification. In practice, it’s absolute chaos.

And unfortunately, India isn’t some bizarre exception, either. It’s a preview.

Zoom out, and you’ll see the same vulnerabilities spreading across the Western defense establishment. Our supply chains are brittle. Our surge capacity is nonexistent. We’re over-regulated, underdeveloped, and dependent on foreign adversaries for basic supply chain inputs — from rocket fuel to semiconductors to high-end drones. Even in Ukraine, where drone warfare has taken center stage, many critical components still come from Chinese factories.

Meanwhile, China is scaling. They’re not just building for themselves — they’re building for export. Their allies can field fleets in months, while we can’t deliver basic munitions on time.

This isn’t just inefficient — it’s dangerous. And the gap is accelerating… an ominous sign for where we are headed.

China Can Build. The West Can’t. That’s the Problem.

The PLA Navy now launches more ship tonnage annually than the U.S. and UK combined. Chinese drone factories are outproducing their Western equivalents by a factor of ten. And the Kashmir engagement may have been China’s most successful marketing pitch yet — a dogfight turned weapons expo.

The West — especially the U.S. — may still hold the edge… for now. American defense systems are highly integrated. Our stealth tech, kill-chain doctrine, and AI-enhanced targeting remain best in class. The DoD’s push toward networked warfighting, mocked in the early 2000s, is now the standard everyone wants and is racing to copy.

But even the best systems fail if they can’t be replaced.

The U.S. keeps betting on a few “exquisite” platforms — the F-22, the Zumwalt-class, whatever NGAD turns into. But by building singular advanced systems, we have fooled ourselves into complacency while ignoring one of the new fundamental truths of modern warfare: quantity matters.

If your adversary can lose ten units and come back with twenty, your technological superiority will eventually mean nothing. And if you lose ten and can't even replace one in an all-out war? You've guaranteed defeat before the conflict even begins.

The Kashmir conflict marks the end of any illusion about a vast technological gap between Western and Chinese capabilities. That advantage is swiftly disappearing. Chinese systems have not only achieved parity but may have surpassed European defense technology. They've demonstrated their systems' reliability, combat effectiveness, and ability for rapid mass production. And they're already deploying this technology to allied nations for real-world testing.

Through Kashmir, China has offered the West a dark preview of what could be in store over the next decade.

If we don’t rebuild our military industrial base — and fast — we’ll lose more than air dominance. We’ll lose deterrence on the global stage. We may even lose Taiwan, and with it, control over the Indo-Pacific.

Kashmir, in many ways, is a final wake-up call that fears about China’s military capabilities are well placed. The time for diplomacy, denial, and pageantry is over.

It's time to build.

—Raghav Raj Mehta

OpenAI is about to raise $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation. It got me thinking about the company and what business analyst Ben Thompson has repeatedly said: OpenAI is an "accidental" consumer company. It's no secret that when they launched ChatGPT in late 2022, they were neither prepared for nor anticipated it becoming the flagship consumer product it became. However, In the two years since, OpenAI has tried but failed to replicate ChatGPT's success.

While the core product is very successful, a wider push to build a ChatGPT ecosystem around and within the app has faltered. The most notable attempt was the GPT Store—an effort to create a custom GPT economy—which didn't take off. They developed advanced voice mode but then frustrated consumers by delaying its launch.

ChatGPT continues to be a cash cow for the company, with strong growth numbers according to leaked internal investor documents. However, this success is driven more by their first-mover advantage than by any inherent superiority of their models. Their flagship GPT-4o and o1 reasoning models only marginally outperform the competition. Many in tech circles are reverting back to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, preferring its human like cadence and coding abilities far more.

OpenAI's inability to intentionally create a breakthrough consumer product is at the heart of the problem. Their only successful product launch was entirely accidental. Everything since has been an extension of that initial success. This isn't all that surprising, though. Since its inception, OpenAI has fundamentally been an AI research lab, not a product company. They inadvertently became a consumer product company in 2022 off the back of ChatGPT.

It's important to note that this new round is a step, largely so that OpenAI can eventually move to turn a profit, go public, and not have to rely on private capital to fund their expansion and offer returns to investors. Though with their current slate of products what that roadmap is, is rather unclear. ChatGPT alone won't scale to a size large enough to make them profitable with their current operating expenses.

Don't get me wrong—it's an impressive business with incredible cash flow. But maintaining that cash flow is almost entirely predicated on having access to cutting-edge models. ChatGPT’s core value prop is granting access to the world's best large language models. Models which, with each iteration, become exponentially more expensive to train.

ChatGPT or API revenues alone can't sustain the training costs. And while Sam Altman is arguably the best at raising capital in private markets, I heavily doubt he'll continue to be able to raise enough money and this often to stay ahead of the competition.

Which brings me to: the competition. OpenAI faces incredibly well-funded rivals, most of which have enough money to outlast them: Google, Meta, Anthropic (backed by Amazon), Apple, X AI, and even their partner Microsoft, which is slowly distancing itself from them. All these players, except Anthropic and X AI, are incredibly well-capitalized and don't rely on AI as their primary revenue driver. Excluding Anthropic, they all also have better direct distribution channels.

My firm belief is that for OpenAI to survive, they need to build a consumer application so fundamentally disruptive that it becomes the industry standard. That is, of course, very expensive to do. And with all their money going towards research and model training, I doubt they have much room to maneuver.

Anthropic, OpenAI's closest competitor, quickly understood this challenge and built its team to be far more product-focused than any other AI shop. Their most recent notable hire in this direction was Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

This shift has already made a huge difference. They launched a highly successful product within Claude called Artifacts, which is likely evolving towards an in-chat editor for code and text. More broadly, when interacting with Anthropic's Claude interface, it's evident they're moving towards a product-driven approach rather than a model-driven one. Their strategy of taking the product route early, before the masses know their product as well as they know ChatGPT, is brilliant. It sets the stage for the kind of company they're aiming to be and establishes consumer expectations early and decisively.

For OpenAI, that pivot is much trickier. As first movers, their identity is largely built on being the industry leader and home of cutting-edge AI models. Falling behind on model development, regardless of what else they might be working on, is a major optics problem for them in a way that it isn't for a second mover like Anthropic.

All of this is without even considering the turmoil going on within the leadership at OpenAI. With almost every co-founder and senior executive having departed in the last 12 months, the company, at least from the outside, seems to be in more disarray than ever. This, along with the complex unwinding and corporate restructuring from Non-Profit to For-Profit, needs to happen. It's one of the conditions for the latest fundraising round. All of this is likely to create all kinds of new challenges. If you need more context, here is a diagram that shows what I am talking about. OpenAI also has a blog post that explains it.

The long short of it is that it's a needlessly complicated, extremely opaque corporate structure that investors are demanding be unwound because of the covenant that makes it a capped profit structure as compared to a much more lucrative uncapped structure. This is the same corporate structure that led to Sam Altman’s brief ouster last year from the company due to “not being candid” with the OpenAI nonprofit board. OpenAI is likely to disband the Non-Profit board and move to a structure similar to that of rival Anthropic, which is a Public Benefit Corporation, a for-profit company with a defined goal that is aligned with the “public good.”

All of this also comes along with the news that Apple earlier this week made a last-minute decision not to invest in this latest round, with SoftBank having to step up instead. This is despite Apple making a big splash earlier this year when, at their World Wide Developer Conference, where they announced a huge partnership with OpenAI for outsourcing certain queries from Apple Intelligence on IOS to ChatGPT.

It isn't exactly the glowing vote of confidence the market is looking for when someone who is supposed to be one of your biggest partners in the near future suddenly decides they don’t want to invest, especially when its an organization as cash-rich as Apple, for whom that amount is likely a rounding error.

For OpenAI, this latest round is likely not its last. The only path to profitability and not having to rely on external funding and equity dilution is to take a step back from model development to build the next game-changing product that can extract more money from consumers and enterprise customers than they're already paying. Doing so, however, is likely to cause them to fall behind in model development and start to harm their only cash cow, ChatGPT, and the API platform. It is a Catch-22 at the heart of the company and one that I believe will begin to play more of a part in shaping the future OpenAI ends up having.

I am really excited to be writing again regularly, especially about stuff like this. But obviously a little nervous too. I’d love to hear what you think of this so please share your thoughts, either in the comments below or feel free to shoot me a message. Either way, thanks for being here and reading.

A special thank you to Vishwesh Desai and Shailendra Raj Mehta for reading drafts of this.

Snapchat's Origins and Unique IPO Structure

Founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, Snapchat revolutionized social media with its disappearing photos and messages. The company's 2017 IPO was groundbreaking, introducing a share structure that gave founders unprecedented control:

• Class A shares: Publicly traded with no voting rights

• Class B shares: Held by early investors with limited voting power

• Class C shares: Controlled by founders with ten votes per share

This structure effectively nullified shareholder voting rights, a first in public market history. While dual-class shares aren't new, Snapchat's approach went further by eliminating independent oversight and board control.

The Consequences of Unchecked Founder Control

1. Compromised Corporate Governance

With founders wielding absolute control, Snap's board of directors became largely ceremonial. This lack of genuine oversight removed a critical layer of corporate governance, potentially leading to unchecked decision-making and neglect of stakeholder interests.

2. Destruction of Shareholder Value

The impact on shareholders has been severe. An investment of $1,000 in Snap shares at IPO would be worth only $540 five years later, despite the broader tech sector experiencing significant growth during this period.

Snapchat Software Stagnation

1. Fierce Competition

The social media landscape has become increasingly crowded and competitive:

• Instagram's introduction of Stories, a feature similar to Snapchat's core offering, has ate into Snapchat's market share.

• TikTok's explosive growth has captured much of the young demographic that was once Snapchat's stronghold.

• Established players like YouTube continue to innovate and expand their offerings.

2. Monetization Struggles

Despite its large user base, Snapchat has struggled to monetize effectively:

• The ephemeral nature of Snapchat's content poses challenges for traditional advertising models.

• The platform's younger user base may be less receptive to certain types of advertisements.

• Snapchat's ad targeting capabilities may not be as sophisticated as those of competitors like Meta and Google.

3. Innovation Fatigue

While Snapchat was once known for its innovative features, it has struggled to maintain this reputation:

• Many of Snapchat's unique features have been copied and sometimes improved upon by competitors.

• The company's forays into hardware, such as Spectacles, have largely failed to gain traction.

• There's a perception that Snapchat has failed to introduce truly game-changing features in recent years.

Snapchat's Failed Hardware Ventures

Snapchat's unconstrained "Founder Mode" is perhaps most evident in its ill-fated hardware initiatives. Most notably due to the founders recklessly pursuing ideas in a manner that dooms them before the project can even get off the ground.

Pixy Drone

Launched in April 2022, the Pixy drone was discontinued within four months after selling only 71,000 units. Issues included:

• Safety concerns

• Limited functionality

• Poor user retention

• Competition from smartphones

The project culminated in a total recall in February 2024 due to fire and injury risks.

Spectacles

Snapchat's Spectacles, launched in 2017, were arguably ahead of their time. However, they suffered from poor execution and failed to address key user concerns. Despite these setbacks, Snapchat persists with Spectacles, now in its fifth generation. However, the latest iteration still faces significant hurdles:

1. Limited availability (developer-only subscription model)

2. Experimental nature and niche target audience

3. Ongoing battery life limitations

4. Narrow field of view for AR experiences

5. Basic software and limited applications

6. High cost for developers ($1,188 for the first year)

7. Lack of compelling use cases

Snapchat Spectacles vs. Meta Ray Bans

Snapchat's approach to AR glasses stands in stark contrast to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. While both products share similarities, Meta's offering has gained mass appeal, whereas Snapchat's has struggled to find its footing. Here is how Snapchats offering compares -

Snapchat, rather than focusing on consumers, is attempting to attract developers by scrapping its consumer-oriented Spectacles offering entirely. This appears to be a long-term strategy to build a developer ecosystem before relaunching the product to the public. However, even with this approach, they've made a significant mistake by charging developers for the kit. While easily correctable, it's unlikely to be addressed due to the CEO's overly optimistic view about demand for his product.

The core issue likely stems from a delusionally optimistic view about consumer and developer interest in Snapchat's products. The company's decision to charge developers while not offering the product to consumers is a significant misstep. Ideally, top AR developers should receive the product for free, enabling them to create apps that consumers want to use on the device. The only way to drive meaningful traffic to a new product, especially one in a unique category, is by fostering meaningful apps. History suggests that these apps are unlikely to come from an internal team. Snapchat is attempting to emulate Apple's approach to developers without possessing Apple's brand value, power, or recognition. It's an incredibly misguided strategy, chasing short-term returns rather than building a community around a product that could if developed correctly, be the next iPhone-level device or interface.

Potential for Recovery?

Despite these challenges, Snapchat still maintains significant strengths:

1. Large User Base: As of March 2024, Snapchat boasts over 800 million monthly active users, demonstrating its substantial reach.

2. Strong Daily Engagement: The platform's 422 million daily active users indicate high user loyalty and consistent interaction.

3. Growing Subscription Service: Snapchat+ reached 9 million subscribers worldwide in 2024, pointing to promising new revenue streams.

4. Expanding Global Presence: The platform has experienced significant growth beyond North America and Europe, with 235 million users in Q2 2024.

To Founder Mode or Not to Founder Mode

While "Founder Mode" can drive innovation and success, Snapchat's story serves as a cautionary tale of unchecked founder control. At Snapchat, this approach has led to significant value destruction and missed opportunities to create what could have been a generational company. Despite having all the ingredients for success and an incredibly sticky core product, Snapchat's lack of accountability and excessive founder control have transformed what should have been at least a $100 billion company into one that has stagnated and declined—during a period when capital markets were arguably more friendly to tech companies than ever before.

The "Founder Mode" essay sparked considerable debate on tech Twitter, likely because founders are often polarizing, delusionally optimistic and bold, However, when paired with hubris or unchecked power, this mindset can lead to outcomes like Snapchat's. Many venture capitalists, perhaps rightly so, worry that "Founder Mode" might become an excuse for reckless decision-making or, in Snapchat's case, executing smart ideas in misguided ways. I suppose in the grand scheme of things the concept of "Founder Mode" is just the latest example of the tech industry's ongoing struggle to balance visionary leadership with responsible governance.

Time will tell.

Why It Matters

Hollywood is in tumult as the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actor's Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) halt film and TV production. While pay disputes and working conditions are the surface issues, the strikes underscore a seismic shift in the industry: The streaming revolution has broken Hollywood's traditional business models, leaving creatives and studios at odds over revenue.

The Big Picture

For most of Hollywood's history, the math was simple. Movies turned profits through box office and home video, while TV shows relied on ad dollars tied to ratings. These models encouraged quality, as they rewarded everyone from writers to actors with residuals when their projects succeeded.

The Shifting Equations

Streaming has upended these equations. With subscribers paying a set monthly fee for limitless content, the connection between how many people watch something and how much money it makes has vanished. Without transparent streaming metrics, it's unclear how to distribute residuals fairly. Consequently, creatives make less, studios are less motivated to invest in quality, and everyone is more expendable.

The New Normal

Don't expect the status quo to return. While studios and unions may find common ground, the compromise is likely to hurt both parties in ways they haven't fully comprehended.

The Great Reset

The streamers' heyday was a golden age of risk-taking. Studios greenlit more diverse and niche projects than ever before. That's going to change. New residual arrangements will make studios think twice before taking creative gambles, as the financial stakes will be higher.

The Wallet Squeeze

Here's the kicker: streaming is about to get pricey, akin to today's cable costs. If you want access to all your favorite shows and movies, prepare to fork over $150-$200 monthly. Don't get it twisted, the consumer is going to pay for everything. The golden age of streaming is over.

The Piracy Boom

As prices rise, expect more consumers to abandon their subscriptions and flock to torrents and online movie sites. Studios may find themselves hemorrhaging money, not just because of higher residuals and production costs, but because a chunk of their audience will find illicit ways to access content.

The Bottom Line

The Hollywood strikes serve as a wake-up call for an industry in flux. Even after the dust settles, the effects of the streaming revolution will continue to reverberate. The model that propelled Hollywood for decades is disintegrating, leaving studios, creatives, and audiences navigating uncharted waters.

CryptoPunks. They were the first proper NFT collection on the blockchain. Created by Larva Labs in 2017, they were a collection of 10,000 unique, 24x24 pixelated avatars. People could claim punks for free at launch; however, they have since exploded in value. The most expensive sale happened in February of 2022, when a Cryptopunk sold for a record amount of $23.7 Million.

CryptoPunks have consistently sat in the daily top 10 most-traded collections by volume (Currently sitting at #1), with a minimum asking price of 65 Ethereum or roughly $82,000. It has also led them to Auction houses, the likes of Sotheby's and Christie's, where they've sold for millions of dollars.

CryptoPunks, for the longest time, had absolutely no utility. They were very literally just images. Unlike other popular NFT projects, they granted you absolutely no perks. Most people bought them "for the art" or as an investment, as it was one of the first NFT collections and held both historical and symbolic value.

In March 2022, via a press release, Yuga Labs announced that they were acquiring Crypto Punks and Meebits from Larva Labs for an undisclosed amount. Yuga Labs is the creative force behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, arguably one of the most, if not the most, influential NFT collections in the world.

Known for creating value around their NFTs and their community-first approach, it was almost certain that Yuga Labs had plans for Punks and Meebits. The only question was, what? Yuga has created more monetary and cultural value for its holders than any other NFT collection. So how were they going to create value for Punks?

Their announcement message about the acquisition made a couple of things very clear. They announced plans to hand over commercial rights of the artwork to holders similar to their other collections (BAYC, MAYC, and BAKC). This would allow holders of Crypto Punks and Meebits full autonomy to use their NFTs and their likeness in any way they would like on products or as brands of their own.

They also made it very clear they were not going to make CryptoPunks anything like Bored Apes and the club and storytelling structure they had created around that franchise. They, however, wanted to build utility around the IP and for holders. They were certain they wanted to preserve the ethos of Punks in whatever they decided to do with the IP while also making Punks a part of the broader vision and plans they were executing at Yuga.

This was something they immediately cemented just days after this announcement when Yuga announced their ambitious plans to deliver a Metaverse they called "Otherside". In their trailer, they teased that Crypto Punks would be playable and natively compatible at launch. It was the first proper utility that punks would have.

But while this was exciting, Yuga's vision for what Punks are seems to be a lot bolder.

In November 2022, weeks before the crypto world was set to descend in Miami for Art Basel, they announced their first initiative for punks since taking it over, the Punks Legacy Project. A project their team will undertake that, as they put it, "will oversee the donation and installation of several CryptoPunks to leading contemporary art museums around the globe, providing these museums with resources regarding security, NFT display best practices, and Web3 education". The first donation was to the ICA Miami, which would begin exhibiting the Punk on the 2nd of December, right in time for Art Basel.

Yuga donating punks to museums is an interesting approach. Putting it in a gallery next to a Keith Haring or an Andy Warhol is a great way to cement punks and their legacy in the art world.

The first way for people to appreciate art is for them to see it. And most of all, to see it in a museum, where they can interact with it. As Yuga put it, "CryptoPunks are contemporary art. They belong in museums".

Putting it in a Museum is groundbreaking for its legitimacy and also for its exposure. Art is only art when people interact with it. And putting Punks in a museum is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent strategies to get more people toinbuild notoriety and awareness.

But what it also seems to expose is what Yuga's broader vision for CryptoPunks might be in their ecosystem. The founders and the community have often referred to Bored Apes as a streetwear brand. The founders, in an interview on the Fullsend Podcast, called it the "Supreme of Web 3". So if Bored Apes are the Supreme, then it certainly seems like the direction of CryptoPunks is more the high fashion couture brand route. This became even more clear when they, in partnership with Tiffanys, offered Punk holders made-to-order bejeweled necklaces of their crypto punks.

For Punk holders, this is a big deal because this is the first part of a plan that could effectively make their NFTs fine art. It makes the IP they own intrinsically more valuable for the simple reason that very few things appreciate in value the way fine art does. By turning CryptoPunks into contemporary art, Yuga is creating utility and value for its holders, and if you think about it, that was their goal from the very start.

Dapper Labs is one of the hottest silicon valley startups, backed by top tier investors like a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), GV (Google Ventures), Samsung, and Endeavour.

So, whats the hype about, and why should you care?

Dapper Labs has developed their own gaming centric blockchain called Flow. It is designed to sustain decentralised gaming projects that require low latency connections. If they are able to create global adoption for this project this will be a massive development and evolution for modern gaming as we know it.

This is because gaming is one of the few industries where decentralisation has incredibly revolutionary and practical use cases. Online gaming as it stands today relies on large servers in each geographic zone. This is an incredibly energy intensive and impractical way to handle the traffic and predicates on data travelling large distances to be processed and then being sent back. It also puts an immense amount of strain on the power grid where these servers are located. If you decentralise the infrastructure it makes it far easier to sustain the network and removes the stress on both the power grid and the network infrastructure.

There are currently a wide array of projects already being used or developed on Flow. This Includes projects by the NBA, NFL and UFC and several projects that are in development including one with the La Liga. And this brings me to Dapper Labs' other killer product.

Dapper Labs has developed a backend platform for these sports leagues to use that essentially helps them create Digital Sports Cards. This takes the current landscape of sports cards collecting to a whole new level.

It essentially allows fans to buy a video NFT of their favourite moment from a match. They also allow people sell their NFT's on the marketplace.

This is revolutionary for a variety of reasons, the biggest being that the sports league and players now get a cut from the secondary market sales of a card. It also removes the issue of having to get your cards verified or graded since everything is authenticated by the ledger on the blockchain and also makes it incredibly easy for people to share their collections with the world.

Dapper Labs' execution of these projects has only further solidified that Digital Collectibles are here to stay and are slowly becoming a mainstay in culture. And with Dapper Labs currently cornering the market it is certainly a company to keep your eye on.

This next stage of gaming is called Play to Earn games (or P2E for short) and these are the future of video games. Companies will pay you to spend time in their universe and they will also reward or pay you for continuing to choose to stay.

This revolution has already begun with games in Web 3 already implementing this in a variety of ways. NFT projects like Creepz, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Swampverse have their own cryptocurrency which is rewarding holders who continue to stake (locking down your NFTs for long periods of time) or hold their NFTs. They also award currency to people that perform tasks or solve in-game puzzles.

Metaverse games like The Sandbox also have a play-to-earn format but use a slightly different approach. They allow players to convert their cash into in-game currency and their in-game currency back in to cash. This allows creators inside the game who are selling artwork, assets, or access to experiences to convert their profits back into actual cash should they ever need to do so. This is allowing creators within the confines of the game to actually make a living playing the game.

So why should you care?

The ramifications of these changes will be felt in every aspect of the entertainment industry. The transition from web 2 to web 3 is changing economics as we know it. We are moving from a cash economy to an attention economy.

Your time, money, and now your attention will be the most valuable commodities. Companies will reward you for the time and money you spend in their universe.

The best part of about all of this is that these new projects have a certain interoperability because they are being built on decentralized platforms.

What this will eventually mean is that when you find something better, rather than losing all that time and progress you made on that video game, you can convert all your assets into cash and take all your accumulated wealth to another universe and set up shop there. Every asset you earn or buy is sellable on the blockchain.

The different types of economics that are being employed for all of this is insane and what it means for the future of entertainment as we know it is still unclear but as a consumer we are all about to gain a whole new type of power over our time and attention. And that is extremely exciting.

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Hope you enjoyed this post.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be unpacking a lot of these abstract Web 3 concepts and projects that incorporate them in unique ways. I'll also be talking about some cool stuff happening in the media industry and what to keep your eyes on.

Keep your eyes peeled for those!

See you next week!