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1/ A 🧵 about who Web3 will empower & how it'll differ from every internet era before it 👇

The single best interview question for hiring senior roles: “What’s important?” Ask and shut up. h/t Don Valentine, founder of @sequoia

On art market cycles

Taking a break from mental health to focus on Twitter.

as a crypto founder, my company @Highlight_xyz was debanked with zero rhyme or reason in 2022. nothing prompted it—no change in business activity, no legal action, no new regulation. it’s amazing to see so many others come forward and admit the same. the craziest part of the experience is how suddenly it occurred and how vividly anti-American it felt, like being on a McCarthy-era hit list. it’s also notable how little mainstream attention it got until @pmarca told @joerogan, despite it being common knowledge among VCs and founders. losing access to the financial system because of backroom pressure from capricious politicians had a profound influence on my commitment to building in crypto. the work we’re doing as an industry is creating a much better world. thank you to our investors who helped us get rightfully re-banked; to @micsolana @nic_carter @laurashin and others who’ve been reporting on this from the trenches; and to @brian_armstrong, @tyler @cameron, @davidmarcus and so many other founders and builders fighting for economic freedom.

1/ Web3 is about networks — new kinds defined by ownership — and @kevin2kelly (aka KK) is one of the deepest OG thinkers on networks 🧠🧠🧠 No surprise @cdixon and others count him as a core influence. How does his thinking on our network era apply to web3?

1/ The Mount Rushmore of cryptoart today would consist of @beeple, @XCOPYART, and @jackbutcher. @SHL0MS deserves to join them, and potentially the pantheon of modern artists.

Blinked and it's been 1 year since we officially launched Highlight out of beta. Thank you to every artist, creator, collector, curator, & partner that's made this journey possible. Looking ahead, we'll continue to ship, innovate, & improve rapidly. Big announcements soon.

Recently, a friend asked if “blockchain art” was just a passing speculative boom and soon to be a cautionary tale. This person studied and now collects physical art. I said the last bull market brought mania and excess. But we haven't seen a reversion to the pre-2021 mean: digital art is now natively blockchain-based. For the world's leading digital artists, *not* using NFTs now doesn't make sense — it's become core to the medium. In technology cycles, we often mistake hype for delusion. We forget how the world looked before. The changes that endure as the dust settles are sometimes hard to miss. Write off reckless traders seeking quick riches. But write off NFT art and you miss a revolution in how seminal artists sell their work, and how individuals, galleries, and cultural institutions collect it. My friend saw NFTs as tulips. But NFTs intrinsically improve how digital art is made, owned, and shared, like the internet did for information. We still have maturing to do as an industry. But writing off “blockchain art” today is like writing off TCP/IP and websites in 2001. NFTs aren't just here to stay, but a 10x improvement for digital artists. They've evolved from a passing craze into the backbone through which era-defining digital art is created, owned, and shared. Ubiquity among the world's most revered digital artists shows this.

Lil secret: We've built a database of the ~1K most iconic digital artists & all their EVM collections & commissioned excellent writers to profile it all. Still figuring out when we'll release this but we're getting closer to becoming the digital art platform the space deserves.

What we're building now is the best product we've ever built, by a long shot. Putting together an early beta list. DM to be added.

caught my eye on @Highlight_xyz this week ✨ ⇣⇣⇣

These aren’t intended to be accurate, but filters for detailed thinking. If you’re asking for $ to build a big and exciting business, surely you’ve thought about the drivers? You have a model/understanding of which inputs drive your P&L? And you can have a fluid discussion on it.

Last week we announced our partnership with @foundation Our @Highlight_xyz engine will power code-based generative art projects within Worlds A quick thread on why this is a big deal for both generative artists and curators 👇

If you loved skateboarding, the internet, punk, rap music, tattoos, digital art, graffiti, zine culture, underground raves, or indie game dev before they were cool to the mainstream, you’re likely into onchain culture now. I've met so many bonafide legends from these subcultures quietly hanging out, basking in the scene. The same DIY spirit, the same 'fuck around and find out' energy, the same creative chaos. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

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some details on COPE SALADA, our first collaboration with @XCOPYART ⇢ 250 fully onchain SVGs (~200 files) ⇢ responsive, interoperable, composable ⇢ private & public sales ongoing ⇢ mach 7+ cope

Florence in the 1480s Paris in the 1870s New York in the 1950s Ethereum in the 2020s

A new era for generative art begins! Thrilled to join forces with @foundation to equip generative artists with decentralized curation tools The future is generative 🎨🚀

it's tough to build an nft platform that isn't fueled by farmers and hype, but popular enough to survive. after 2+ years in the trenches, we're reaching a sustainable business model. with creativity and luck, we'll be able to operate on a very long time horizon.

BRAG ABOUT SOMETHING YOU'RE PROUD OF ACCOMPLISHING IN 2024 ✨✨✨✨✨

We just launched an NFT marketplace. Why? When we first launched Highlight in 2022, NFTs were exploding into mainstream consciousness. Beneath the surface, many dismissed them as speculative casino chips. Yet, we saw—and still see—something radically different. NFTs aren't digital ticker symbols; they're vibrant manifestations of human creativity, community, and culture. For creators, they’re expressions of vision. For collectors, artifacts of belief. Highlight’s marketplace, which we just launched, is designed for believers: ↳ Believers in culture, who see NFTs as a powerful new medium for connection and expression. ↳ Believers in art, who cherish the nuanced stories behind every collection. ↳ Believers in the next chapter of the internet, built on open, decentralized infrastructure. We've listened, failed, tried again, and learned from both what users actually do and brutally honest feedback. We've ignored the speculative noise to build something with real staying power. Today, Highlight is more than just another NFT marketplace: ↳ Comprehensive indexing across Ethereum, @base, @shape, @zora, @Formachain, @zerodotnetwork, and other leading L2s, providing aggregated listings and optimal pricing. ↳ Real-time social feeds and watchlists, with integration into both X and @farcaster_xyz, because NFTs are inherently social. ↳ Curated exhibitions from top DAOs, influential collectors, and visionary funds—bringing you closer to the culture driving NFT innovation. ↳ Zero marketplace fees for artists and communities that have supported us from day one. ↳ Our suite of best-in-class creator tools, empowering the next generation of creators, digital artists, and innovators. Since day 1, we've designed Highlight for clarity, simplicity, and joy—an intuitive experience for exploring and engaging deeply with what you love. I believe NFTs already have redefined culture both online and offline, and will only continue from here. And at Highlight, we're committed to nurturing the vibrant communities and creativity at the heart of this transformation. Welcome back to Highlight.

we've been in the thick of it the past couple months. talking to collectors, creators, engineers, investors. trying to get really honest with ourselves about highlight—what it is, what it could be, what it should be. what’s become clear: something massive is shifting. AI isn’t just another hype wave. it's an interface shift, a mental model shift, a team structure shift. and it's happening faster than most people think. we’ve been exploring what LLMs unlock—not just for creators, but for consumers, builders, and communities. and, honestly, it’s been thrilling. so many old assumptions are breaking down. and we’re feeling the same energy that got us into NFTs in the first place: creative possibility. highlight has always been about creativity, identity, and new forms of expression. but over the past year, we’ve started to feel boxed in by the shape of what we built. we’re proud of the highlight toolkit and marketplace. it’s beautiful, permissionless, and has attracted a real and remarkable base of creators and collectors. feature by feature, it raised the bar for what an NFT platform could deliver, both technically and experientially. but it may not be the final form. or even the right container for what we want to build next. we don’t think marketplaces are the center of the story anymore. the energy has shifted upstream—toward creation, toward experimentation, toward tools and tokens that feel alive. so we're exploring something new. still ahead of the curve, still creator-first, but more native to the moment we’re in. we'll have more to share soon. but for now, just know: we’re more locked in than ever—leaning hard into the future, and more energized than we’ve felt in a long time. eternal gratitude to everyone who’s used highlight— minted, collected, shared, or simply watched from the sidelines. you helped us get here and you’re the reason we’re excited to keep going.

A year ago, we asked: what should a world-class gen art toolkit look like if launched in 2023 vs 2021? Rather than bolting new features onto a product built 2 yrs ago (20 in crypto), we built from first principles: ↳ Artist owned contracts ↳ Open & ungated ↳ Ethereum & all major L2s ↳ Give artists all the data vs just tx hash ↳ Zero %, just a small mint fee @highlight_xyz is built different.

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Yesterday we received a complaint about @thecryptobushi's Certificate of Non-Existency, an artwork referencing a screenshot of a certificate of authenticity for Jesus Mob, a lost XCOPY edition of 100 from a now defunct Bitcoin-based NFT platform called Ascribe. In the midst of dealing with copymint issues this weekend, we quickly took it down. Protecting artists and collectors and maintaining trust and safety is paramount to everything we're building. Over the last 12 hours, our decision was flagged to us by multiple frens, including @XCOPYART. We looked deeper and found that Certificate of Non-Existency is a conceptual play on the fact that the piece in question no longer exists as it was lost in the Ascribe shutdown. The original artwork is CC0; the certificate was shared in the public domain by the owner; and the new title is transformational, adding commentary on digital art platforms, like Highlight. We discussed with both Bushi and the complainant and the artwork is now live for minting again. At a minimum, it provokes meaningful debate on the role of platforms in this space, and adds to the lore around Jesus Mob in particular and XCOPY’s lost work more broadly. Thanks to everyone for engaging so thoughtfully on this and helping to correct the error.

caught my eye on @Highlight_xyz this week 🎇 ⇣⇣⇣ (Hardware by @jackbutcher)

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Spoke to six (6) NFT legends today about what we're shipping soon. Seven more tomorrow. If you understand the space and want a peek behind the curtain, hit me up.

the NFT space doesn't need another marketplace optimized for volume or speculation. what collectors need is a place to discover, understand, and experience the infinite game of building meaningful collections. that's why we're building Highlight to be the collector's NFT marketplace. while others focus on being: "the largest NFT marketplace" (OpenSea) "the NFT Marketplace for pro traders" (Blur) "the leading community-centric NFT marketplace" (MagicEden) we're creating a marketplace built for the joy of collecting.

If you like to make things with computers, the world til now paid you if they fit into two categories: (a) apps / sites / software (b) content / media / ads Now there's another category, (c) onchain art / culture / collectibles ... and it's a big leap forward for humanity.

life goal complete: seeing @larvalabs deploy a new artwork on Highlight part of the excellent @mmERCH drop to raise funds for those impacted by the LA wildfires full league of legends: @niceaunties @GrantYun2 @gremplin @goyong_arts @lifeofc @ClownVamp

We're partnering once again with @coinbase to showcase boundary-pushing generative art on @BuildOnBase during @ArtBasel Miami Beach. We’ll be releasing new works, online and IRL, from three world-renowned generative artists: @carreras_anna, @JoshuaDavis, and @landlinesart1 👇

1. We launched a marketplace 🎉 2. We did a deep-dive on the current landscape and saw both artists and collectors are underserved Looking to bring more transparency and a delightful product experience to secondary art collecting!

Last two years building a product to help creators, mainly artists, make money from their work using NFTs: - Debanked for being a “crypto company” - Six figures in added legal and insurance costs - Zero clarity on what projects the SEC deems a risk And 10K+ creators earned $4M+ for their work Excited for clearer rules to innovate within, and more time/money to focus on helping creators succeed.

What core insight helped drive interest here?

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strategic culture reserve

February was a big one for @Highlight_xyz: ↳ 10x mints, 4x unique wallets ↳ @brtmoments artists-in-residence ↳ @coinbase France launch ↳ Aux Arbres w/ @zancan — biggest gen art project ever (65K mints & still open) ↳ Miss Metaverse w/ @mwiederrecht @CaballeroAnaMa @GAZELL_iO ↳ Projects w/ @basepaint_xyz, Outcasts (@farcaster_xyz peeps know), 𝟺𝟶𝟺 w/ @SHL0MS, many others ↳ Shipped cross-chain minting, embedded wallets w/ @privy_io, gasless minting, lots else More to come.

Asendorf Butcher Cherniak Dounia Edelman Fried Gerrard Harvey Isaksen Jones Kane Lieberman Man Orth Provencher Qian Rainisto Sarin Tau Velitchkova Wander Xie Yun Zucker

caught my eye on @Highlight_xyz this week ⏫ ⇣⇣⇣ (PXL DEX by @kimasendorf)

introducing CryptoParisian #232 somehow snagged a Mona Lisa x France Daft Punk helmet 🤯 thank you @brtmoments

I wrote some learnings on what I wish I'd known as a new crypto founder 👇🔗

Thrilled to be a Week 1 launch partner for Onchain Summer II on @base next week. Last year we were just getting started; this year feels different. Some huge artists will be releasing new projects alongside some new features to help bring the world onchain. More details soon.

Won't sleep until this space has what it deserves: a home for onchain art and culture. Thank you to everyone rooting for us.

Since leaving DoorDash last year, I’ve been working with an insanely talented team on something new in web3. I’m stoked to announce that today we’re launching @highlight_xyz, an end-to-end toolkit for web3 community membership & rewards, no crypto experience required.

Excited to announce @viedotdev is now live in public beta. VIE is an AI-powered platform that lets anyone build and deploy blockchain apps through natural language prompts. Here’s what it does & why we built it 👇

Ok! All systems go. Big launch tomorrow.

Crypto has created a multibillion $ economy for creative people to make art, games, and other cool shit on the internet where previously there was only web design and ad agency jobs. Still don't think that has fully sunk in.

crypto founder here. very real.

PXL DEX 199 500K PXL w/x2 enabled @kimasendorf

3/ Web1 brought access to *information tools* & led to Netscape, Amazon, Google. Web2 was about *communication tools* eg FB, Uber, Airbnb. Web3 is about *economic tools*: blockchains, tokens, smart contracts.

0xDEAFBEEF Abosch Bloom ClownVamp DesLauriers Esherick Fradina Gysin He Ionson Jovanić Klingemann Ledezma Myers Nahiko Oostenbroek Pikelny qubibi Rizzolli Shannon Tsukamoto Van Arman Wagner XCOPY Yan Zancan

A bunch of 🖼️🖼️🖼️ coming If you're an artist frustrated by X and thinking about building a direct, unruggable relationship with collectors, Farcaster is a good place to check out With Frames, we're building tools help drive engagement in your work directly from a social feed

We are going to build the world’s best marketplace for NFTs, lots of progress soon to be released. 2025 is going to be fun :)

coming soon to a mint near you 👀

gm Shattered Coordinates by @jackbutcher

1/ Real-world adoption of digital assets is accelerating not just with financial institutions (eg ETFs), but cultural ones. Combine24 is a generative art competition hosted by the Finnish National Gallery that is rethinking what cultural adoption can look like.

Generative art isn't an aesthetic It isn't only randomly deterministic It isn't just “long-form” or “artist curated” Generative art: uses autonomous system(s) outside of the artist's control And in a digital context, we're barely at the beginning of where it's going

Highlight is reimagining, from first principles, how NFT sales and offers should work if you're actively collecting or trading NFTs and have specific thoughts, let's chat i'm open to meet up in the Bay Area, by video call, or async let's make collecting exciting again

A year ago we convinced @mwiederrecht @lennyjpg @wowgreat @toThePixel to do something a bit crazy called Onchain Summer on a new, little-known L2 called Base. We had just re-launched and had no right to release work with artists of their caliber. We had no business being featured alongside the likes of Manifold or Zora by @jessepollak and team. Out of kindness, they all took a bet on us, so we hustled non-stop to seize the moment. These collections (each linked below) were the first fully onchain generative works on Base. We had no idea 18K would be minted; that Base would grow into the ecosystem it is today; or that L2s, open editions, and low price/high volume mints would expand the landscape in much more accessible, sustainable directions. This space moves fast but kindness is the through line that makes it special.

for Bright Moments Paris, four artists created generative artworks w/ @Highlight_xyz on @base they're exhibited virtually by @foundation & IRL by @brtmoments they're being minted simultaneously on Highlight, FND, BM, @CoinbaseWallet & via smart contract this is web3

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Cross-chain minting is live for @brtmoments artists-in- residence @wwatkns @nicolasdnl @iamelizasj (shown below) @v3ga collections mint artwork on any chain using funds from any chain

gm BREEZE A #22 by @pointline_

vibes via the king, @Nicolas_Sassoon @viedotdev soon.

Hardware #21 by @jackbutcher

Link #2 by the maestro @andreasgysin presented by @nguyenwahed on @Highlight_xyz

Consider that just a few years ago it was nearly impossible to sell a digital artwork to a willing buyer on the internet. Now tens of thousands of people do this every day.

Underrated alpha on AI model adoption and the scaling wars is @openrouter's live token-usage rankings. Not sure there's a better public dataset on this.

For anyone interested in _really_ understanding DAOs, this book is an A++ primer on what’s come before. h/t @sriramk @avichal for recommending on a recent @GoodTimeShowCH

Excited to join the (2015) community with two pieces from @elmanmansimov's alignDRAW. These represent the first-ever outputs from text-to-image AI — a real piece of history. Looking forward to being part of the cult.

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The reason Highlight will always be an open platform is because we view art broadly. Art expands our minds, brings awareness to how society is changing, and connects humans by sparking curiosity and understanding. Creations that check those boxes are art. We live in a world that’s often pulling us apart. Art nudges us together. The world needs more of what affirms and connects us. The world needs more art—people creating it, and people collecting it. An open platform celebrates the vast spectrum of human creativity.

while Marfa is amazing, it's wild it has two digital art galleries & there’s zero dedicated in the Bay Area. we have 5+ computer museums & just as many major art institutions, all operating in parallel vs bridging tech + art in the world's leading tech hub. time to change?

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Still absorbing CRAWL by @travess on @FeralFile, maybe my favorite digital art release so far this year. A complex, boundary-pushing project, CRAWL is worth examining in more detail if you're looking to understand the frontier of digital art and culture. Quick 🧵👇

1/ Art expands human consciousness: it elevates how we look at, and see ourselves in the world. And it's expanding faster than ever thanks to digital ownership. I've been reading about the recent evolution of art and markets in society. Here are 10 books that helped me learn:

Soon, Highlight will offer a full-featured marketplace designed to appeal to sharp, demure NFT collectors the way Blur appealed to soulless airdrop farmers. Cultural context > price tickers Fun > FOMO Social signals > zero-sum PvP Early September.

Announcing two big features: ↳ Creator rewards: 50/50 mint fee split on free collections (0.0004 ETH per mint; creators still keep 100% of sales on paid mints) ↳ Mint with DEGEN Excited to make onchain creativity easier and more rewarding for all creators.

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Sad to miss Marfa this year but it's my daughter's birthday this weekend and we're close to shipping a bunch of big updates. Family + Highlight first. That said, stay on the look out for an exclusive swag item. IYKYK

Tools/services I recommend to other founders (9-10 NPS): @Linear, @Mercury, @Cartainc, @Superhuman, @AngelList Lots of other stuff we use that's just OK. What're you most likely to recommend?

Excited for native gen art mints with warps on @farcaster_xyz! ↳ Built-in support for any Highlight collection on @base or @Optimism ↳ Total cost (incl mint fee) must be sub 900 warps Ty @generativelight for heralding a new era ⚔️

December will be huge for generative art And for @Highlight_xyz

caught my eye on @Highlight_xyz this week ‼️ ⇣⇣⇣ (The Inner Wilds by @smnta___)

BREEZE A #22 by the inimitable @pointline_

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We think onchain creators should have options, not get boxed into metas ⇢ Sell at a fixed price? Standard, keep 100% of sales ⇢ Run an auction & market-price your work? Got you ⇢ Offer ‘free’ mints? Take half our fee + 10% referrals Artists + options = better outcomes

As a digital artist, if you could accept ETH or other crypto but it would auto-convert and land in your wallet as USDC, would you use this? Idea: makes tax season much easier 1/ hell yes 2/ maybe 3/ no h/t @yungwknd

NFTs are at the beginning of a seismic shift in value creation. Like many trends that begin on a frontier of human x computer interaction, there are signs from earlier eras that they will have a profound, disruptive effect for decades to come: 👇

Highlight is a small, scrappy team with a few core values: ↳ Shipping good product quickly ↳ Supporting ambitious artists & creators ↳ Bias for action ↳ Detail orientation ↳ Optimism about being early to a global paradigm shift Not many teams in web3 operate like we do.

we’re going to be experimenting a lot with ranked auctions + other social minting experiences stay tuned

1/ 🚨⚠️ Warning: This thread contains flashing images that may cause seizures for those with photosensitivity. Viewer discretion is advised. ⚠️🚨 What is glitch art, who is creating in this genre, and why is it incredible? (The Troll, @bongdoe)

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0xfff Aversano Brinkman Cortright De Giuli Esherick Furie Gachadoat Herndon Iyer Jacobson Kusano Lucréce Murakami Neff Osinachi Pasma Qubibi Rozendaal Silver Tarbell Ubermorgen Vella Wang Xie Yorktown Zancan