I've gotten a fair number of new followers from the crypto space, so figured I'd re-introduce myself.

Here's a thread:

(this might get long)

I'm first and foremost a musician and that is my life's work. In fact, it's the only job I've ever had. I became a working pro in college (2007) and the rest is history. I've written for TV, film, ads, remixes, originals, even a ballet. Every size artist and label.

Through that I've experienced the worst case of parasitic middleware type of behavior. Little did I know what I was getting into when I graduated in 2008. Try to think of a more toxic industry, I challenge you.

Things are improving but we have much further to go.

Skipping ahead to late 2016, I stumbled on a video of @VitalikButerin talking about this idea.

An idea of a programmable general purpose blockchain.
On the surface it just sounds like jargon, but underneath the hood, it symbolized freedom.

We could build a more equitable system.

The possibility of cutting out all of that entrenched middleware that plagued my industry was too hard to ignore. I became obsessed and absorbed as much information as I could. There had to be a better way.

Soon after I had the pleasure of meeting @UjoMusic ( @JesseGrushack @JackSpallone @simondlr & team) & lots of @Consensys folks, @ethereumJoseph.

I had seen the work they had done with @imogenheap and wanted to work with them on releasing an album through this platform.

Downloadable MP3/WAV files hosted on @IPFS that could be purchased with ETH through a smart contract.

On the surface, kind of antiquated, even in 2017. However, it was more about the idea. Again, freedom. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nevzbz/this-dj-has-released-the-first-full-length-album-using-the-ethereum-blockchain

A direct transaction with my fans. It's such a simple idea but completely non-existent in the current system. Despite the 27 steps to convert fiat into ETH and get it into metamask, we had a fairly successful release and I felt welcomed by the ETH community.

We even issued a $EGO (name of the album) token to people that purchased it.

Bear market did the bear market thing and a lot of exciting projects died or fizzled out, ujo included.

The ideas persisted though.

It became painfully obvious that we were so early and it's gonna take a few years for the infrastructure to evolve before we can build consumer level dapps.

Even in 2020, a lot of the dapps with real users require a fair amount of know-how.

I continued to follow the space during the crypto winter and despite @CryptoHayes celebrating sub-100 ETH, the devs continued to dev.

I saw projects evolve like @MakerDAO @compoundfinance and @AudiusProject on the music side (which I just joined as an advisor).

All the garbage ICO crowd moved out, probably into 420 stonks.

I got busy with writing another album but I kept playing with what we now call DeFi. I had one of the early CDPs, I was an early LP for the LINK/ETH @UniswapProtocol pool (and got rekt with IL lol)

Earlier this year I was introduced to @js_horne from @ourZORA through @JackSpallone.

Back in the Ujo days we had talked about tokenizing physical products but Zora successfully solved this. It's quite elegant really.

The solution, a redemption button that burns the token.

So then we released $TAPE and you all went a bit crazy with it lol.

https://ourzora.com/rac/tape 

At one point in time, it was one of the most expensive cassette tapes of all time. A modest MC of 60 thousand dollars for a cassette tape in 2020.

Turns out music does have value.

And here we are in 2020, throwing yield generating stablecoins into unaudited staking pools named after food groups. Caution aside, I absolutely love it. It reminds me of the early internet. Open source has bite now.

I'm having more fun now than I did in 2017.

Of course there are problems, but we have the smartest people I've ever met working on solving them. One of the main promises of ethereum was the metcalfe's network effect and I'm seeing it unfold.

DeFi is just the start.

Modern agriculture for millenials, aka yield farming, probably isn't sustainable over the long term, but this is the fun part where we get to experiment with governance systems and iterate quickly. @YamFinance was better than any rollercoaster I've been on.

@AndreCronjeTech @iearnfinance @CurveFinance @BalancerLabs @AaveAave @synthetix_io @NexusMutual @xdaichain @akropolisio @renprotocol @UMAprotocol @mstable_ @raiden_network @KyberNetwork @maticnetwork to name a few.

I likely differ from a lot of the crypto crowd on this, but I don't think most people should invest in this. It's far too volatile and it's likely unhealthy.

Perhaps after some maturity the FI crowd can park their USD for some 6/7% compounding interest and live the van life.

There's no shortage of risk hungry dumb money flowing into the space and VCs are ready to dump their 100x gains on you. Not sure we need more of that.

I loved @ErikVoorhees analogy of crypto being an organism. ( @BanklessHQ podcast) There's good and bad. Things come and go. Ideas are born and eventually die, and re-born again.

It's freedom and I can't wait to see what comes next.