Maybe the Most Important Legacy of NFTs

Streetwear guided us into business. NFTs walked us into the future.

It just struck me the other day - I have a new book coming out! How cool is that?

My first book, This Is Not A T-Shirt, published in the Summer of 2019 and the tour took me right up until the pandemic broke (In fact, COVID-19 interrupted the Asian portion of that tour). “T-Shirt” performed better than my wildest dreams. Not only did it root me as a veritable author, it took on a life of its own as a national bestseller. Many budding entrepreneurs, brand builders, and streetwear enthusiasts have written notes in the margins, folded the paperback, and carry it with them in their back pocket. I just checked. On Amazon, the book still stands at 5 full stars with over 1,000 ratings! It’s also an Editors’ Pick and won a couple other awards along the way.

My next book, NFTS ARE A SCAM / NFTS ARE THE FUTURE, officially drops on Tuesday and once again, I’m ready to be surprised. It’s a bit different this time - the subject matter is even more niche. It’s also arguably a funky time to publish a book on NFTs. Trading volume and pop culture interest have simmered over the last year. “So, why an NFT book now?” I’ve been asked in recent interviews. Well, for starters, it’s not really about NFTs. It’s about us.

As I’ve mentioned in previous Substacks, “SCAM” is an examination of who we are at this point in history. Why we collect what we collect. The hunger for relationships. Challenging ancient systems and institutions. And even the quest for immortality, God, and higher consciousness. If you read “T-Shirt,” I wasn’t really talking about streetwear or fashion. By the end of my memoir, you probably thought a little deeper about the value of community, voice, and identity. Fashion was never solely about fabrics and tailoring. Those were the vessels, the conduits. Fashion was about self-expression and humanness.

Speaking of bridges, Streetwear was never just about Streetwear, either. For generations, via the Trojan horse of hoodies and expensive sneakers, young collectors have been inspired to design T-shirts and start their own brands. One thing leads to the next and suddenly, you’re running a business with Tax IDs, permits, and a public storage unit. Twenty years ago, Ben and I had no intention of running a full-scale operation out of a 90,000 square foot warehouse of screen-printing machines and staff. We just wanted to play in the game. Make a limited-edition T-shirt. Sell out of it. Slap some stickers on some street signs. Next thing you know, we’re businessmen.

I regularly run into successful tech startups, nonprofits, and agencies who got their start in streetwear. Learning the art of branding, networking, and streetwear principles (like scarcity, collaborations, and drop mechanics) led them down a path of entrepreneurship and ownership. Food mogul Andy Nguyen is an apt illustration. Andy was from our same streetwear class, founding IM King in the 2000s out of Orange County. Today, he is responsible for a slate of restaurants and venues like Matte Black Coffee, Afters Ice Cream, and Bored N Hungry. If you study his model, however, you’ll see that much of the operations and branding mechanisms were directly lifted from the streetwear blueprint.

I saw the same thing once I dove into Web3 and NFTs. Here, they’re called “projects” instead of “brands.” They’re called “communities” instead of “customers.” But, the rules are the same. In fact, many early founders like the CryptoPunks and Bored Apes guys told me that they modeled their hype machines around streetwear brands like Supreme and The Hundreds. Instead of accessing the streetwear club through skate culture or the sneaker scene, they snuck in through the side door of crypto.

Meanwhile, we (The Hundreds) were doing the reverse…

Throughout my career, I’ve felt unwelcome to two rooms: Tech and Finance. Many of you, especially if you subscribe to MONOLOGUE out of streetwear or art interests, may also have a strained relationship with Tech and Finance. For one, we were duped into believing that pure art and financial interest are divorced from each other. “True creatives are bad at business and should tend to their imaginations.” Second, technology is robotic, synthetic, and dorky. Black turtleneck uniforms, gadgets… there’s nothing cool about it.

That being said, it couldn’t get any more gross than Crypto, which is a hybrid of both of those worlds. But something interesting happened in late 2020. As NFT curiosity was roiling, there was a sudden demand for artists, culture builders, and community organizers. For years, crypto day-traders had been flipping digital penny stocks, but now they could be attached to a visual. Some might even call it “art.” The word was out. One by one, everyday artists and creators wandered into the lush valley of ripe and fleshy Ethereum. And all partook and were merry.

For a spell. One problem with the 2021 NFT model was that, although the artists and creators did their part to stomp on their side of the see-saw, the ecosystem was still heavily weighted around profits. NFTs’ cultural seeds weren’t afforded enough time to sprout. And so the hyperactive trading and selling narrative won out, eclipsing the art. In recent weeks, the market’s slid right back to flipping faceless coins like $PEPE again. Was it all for naught?

As I disclaim in the preface to “SCAM,” I got plenty wrong in recording these essays from the Metaverse over the last couple of years. Foremost, I underestimated how slowly mainstream culture would adopt blockchain technology. Bored Ape summer and the million dollar JPEGs stole the show - it was hard to work against the noise and distraction of easy money. So, the more substantive highlights of Web3 were buried under the headlines of gambling cartoons. Yet, I still close the book out with a chapter entitled, “NFTS ARE THE FUTURE.” I do believe Web3’s strongest ideals and goals will survive.

But what about now? Have NFTs brought about any salient progress or systemic change? Remember those two rooms - Tech and Finance? When you think about it, over the last decades, those are the groups that have amassed the most money and power. Perhaps there was a reason we were left outside!

Since the NFT boom of 2021, I’ve witnessed countless friends - who would have typically shied away from any Tech/Finance association in the past - carve out a space for themselves in these arenas. Streetwear designers turned app developers. Entertainers turned AR/VR architects. Snoop Dogg is building metaverses! I’m one of these people myself. Until Web3, I would’ve never labeled myself a Tech person. Now, I’m finding myself speaking as an expert at Tech conferences. Before crypto, I was less interested in stocks and financial health. Although I ideologically strove for wealth parity, I had no idea how to actually institute it. Now, I better understand a system that has historically been stacked against the less privileged and lesser informed. And I’m better prepared to reshape it.

NFTs’ greatest legacy may be that it bridged an entire class of creators, disruptors, and activists to Tech/Finance. Look at AI and AGI. Artificial Intelligence has been around for generations, yet innovation has exploded over the last half-year. We can attribute this spike in growth to the nature of the exponential technology. Yet, it’s hard to dismiss the timing of NFT deceleration and AGI acceleration. As money dried up in Web3 (from trading to VC investments) by the Fall of 2022, much of that energy was re-routed to ChatGPT. Many NFT influencers sharply pivoted to AI-themed Twitter Spaces. The smarter folks knew that Web3 and AI are complementary and brought generative AI into the fold of their blockchain work. I feel better knowing that the communities that have traditionally been left out of engineering Tech/Finance are now incorporating their voice in this next chapter, in this new future.

For many of us who got into NFTs, the Metaverse, and crypto over the most recent run, we may have come for the money, the opportunity, the creativity, or the community. But now that we find ourselves in the boardroom, we’re not leaving. More importantly, we’re keeping the door open for the others. You belong here too.