Three. BIG. Things. 4/19
If you missed it, we got it. An art, tech, whatever newsletter.
Took a break last week to move apartments. I’m here in some cozy new digs, and we’ve got plenty of talk about, so let’s not delay.
This Week’s Three BIG Things:
At Last, a Single OG Marketplace Remains
If Shoe Companies are Pivoting into AI, Shouldn’t We?
The Trump Crypto Empire’s Vileness Spares Nobody but Itself
Okay, Let’s Get On With It
1. Where Have All the Good Platforms Gone?
A few months ago, Blackdove —a niche digital art-focused screen-streaming company which neither I, nor anybody I knew, had ever heard of— erupted into mainstream crypto art consciousness when it announced the acquisition of Foundation, one the longest-running (and most criticized) NFT marketplaces still operating. Blackdove’s purchase would supposedly create “a fully integrated infrastructure that allows clients to browse, purchase, and display digital art seamlessly,” a single do-it-all outlet for crypto art postured as beneficial to both preexisting crypto artists and incoming collectors. After the shuttering of platforms like Makersplace, KnownOrigin, NiftyGateway, and Async.Art that point, Foundation was one of the few remaining NFT marketplaces considered “OG.” If only because of how many works were minted on Foundation historically, Blackdove became a conversation topic and point of intrigue. I’ve written about Blackdove’s laughably incompetent communications department, but the news from this week suggests that Blackdove’s ineptitude extends all the way to its Mergers & Acquisitions team too.
As per a press release posted on Foundation’s Twitter Thursday morning, Blackdove announced:
“Our intent in acquiring Foundation was to complete the Blackdove software infrastructure with asset tokenization…Due to the fast-moving nature of the acquisition, full due diligence was only able to be completed post-operational handover. During this phase, it became evident that building our own marketplace is the path that makes the most sense for where we are taking the company.”
After cries of ambiguity, Blackdove clarified themselves in a separate announcement posted one day later, this time on their own Twitter, writing:
“We remain genuinely committed to this platform and its community…Unfortunately, our request for a reasonable 30-day window to work through a disputed contract matter was rejected outright. That decision left us with no viable path forward at this time. Our hand was forced.”
It’s tough to get past all the marketeering double-speak Blackdove so often employs, but apparently, Blackdove (who claims to have “spent tens of thousands of dollars completing the platform migration and building the infrastructure required to support Foundation at scale”) did not realize who they were getting into business with, and so began the process of absorbing Foundation into itself (a cultural, technical, and financial investment), even going so far as to announce the acquisition and takeover Foundation’s Twitter page, before a contract was signed.
Forgive me if I’m wrong —I didn’t go to business school like the big brains at Blackdove, after all— but generally speaking, I’d suggest two parties sign a contract before embarking upon the acquisition process. Perhaps Blackdove’s CFO missed that day of his MBA program.
Blackdove and Foundation’s one-night-stand leaves many questions, like, for instance, “What happens to all the art hosted on Foundation’s smart contract that Blackdove had promised to preserve?”
Foundation itself has no stated interest in continuing operations, with its founder Kayvon Tehranian writing in his lengthy “A Letter to the Foundation Community”:
“As part of our wind-down process, our infrastructure has already been spun down, and we're not in a position to bring the platform back online…We're working on providing an easy way for you to unlist and retrieve any NFTs currently held in [Foundation’s proprietary] contract [whose front-end is currently shut-down], and will share details soon.”
It’s not the first time we’ve heard about a given platform’s woe-is-us difficulty in honoring any commitment to the artists on their platform. Some observers have noted that Foundation, a company that made over $28mm in revenue, would need pay only around ~$20/month to keep their collective NFT assets pinned to IPFS in perpetuity. Lending validity to that number, curator and critic Regina Harsanyi notes that “the entirety of Foundation is less than 20 TB.”
As always, artist Bryan Brinkman was on-hand to say the right things, not only reminding his fellow creatives how to self-pin their NFTs to IPFS (and thus keep individual artworks from going dark), but contextualizing the Foundation failure in no uncertain terms:
Brinkman goes on to call Foundation “the ‘Blur’ of art platforms,” referencing Blur, the Opensea competitor, whose race to gain market share led to a wholesale abandonment of creator rewards (the business-y way of saying artist royalties). Quite possibly, the death of crypto art’s value-driven early era occurred there.
As often happens when a platform shutters, horror stories galore have popped-up about Foundation’s platform, values, and most importantly, team. “Foundations [sic] was never about art or artists, it was about making money for Kayvon and his crew,” wrote FrankNFT on Twitter. Collector and curator, TheJPEGGallery, adds that, “The art cabal is real, it’s never been about artists for most of the platforms. It’s about making money, creating a bull shit narrative and convincing people what to buy.” And finally (for our purposes), satirist 787FKA wrote, “We’ve collectively strayed so far from the light (manifold) that people, upon hearing of Foundation’s wind-down, are asking ‘so where do we mint our art?’”
787’s comments got me thinking. While I haven’t seen many actual artists lamenting a lack of platform accessibility due to Foundation’s closure, his words remind us just how few platforms remain within crypto art. On top of that, none these platforms really resemble the idealized, democratic, discoverable, decentralized paragon of a marketplace that many envisioned as inevitable just a few years ago. Each of these remaining platforms is nonstandard in their own way. Opensea, SuperRare, Manifold, are each hosts unto themselves, but there’s a bunch more I’ve conceptually collected together into what I’m calling “the Boutiques”, which includes platforms like Transient Labs and Verse, for example.
Opensea is its own creature, a behemoth so massive and thus so unique in the greater NFT landscape that it can somehow survive misstep after misstep after misstep. Endless, continual misteps. There’s nothing instructive to learn from Opensea other than “It’s really helpful to have made billions of dollars at some point,” so let’s move on.
SuperRare, however, is a fascinating case which I have written about extensively, usually for the ways they frustrate and depress me, but this is a good reason to discuss their successes, of which there have been many. That they have been uniquely adept at preceding larger trends (like the move of big collectors away from unimportant artists; embracing a canon definition of crypto art importance), both for good and for bad. That they used their serious first-mover advantage to win the hearts of a nascent crypto art community, proving sturdy enough at all steps to bulwark themselves against anti-gatekeeping cries from trash artists and otherwise. That they hired multi-talents all across the board, for instance. Curators like An Loremi who are legitimately awesome at what they do and great at making connections and social media savvy. Zack Yanger, who started in 2018 as SuperRare’s Chief Marketing Officer, who proved himself an enormously capable cultural connoisseur, an artist unto himself, a host unto himself, half influencer and half critic and half community nexus, one of the few universally-beloved figures in the space. Zack, Paloma, John, just the first names of their longest-tenured employees carry connotations of excellence. Perhaps because of their team’s visibility, SuperRare has also proven itself receptive to criticism, as in the event of the Matt-Kane-led “Minimum 10% Royalties — Letter to Platforms”, after which SuperRare loudly embraced artist royalties as a necessity (better to be late to the party than not show up). Really it’s hard to compare SuperRare to anyone else because their history is so long and illustrious. Amongst the most illustrious early crypto art blogs was SuperRare’s. Some of crypto art’s most notorious missteps were theirs as well. They seemed to raise money at the exact right time, release a token before that looked desperate, choose the right artists to champion, enter into physical spaces successfully, make intelligent partnerships. I’m sure many will take issue with me calling SuperRare, simply, a business well-run, and that’s not the whole story either, but their continued existence is proof alone of their adaptability and vision.
Manifold, meanwhile, is hardly a platform at all, more a tool. Hands-off, approachable, decentralized, a way for artists to mint work independently, and yes, without many of the things the other platforms (oftentimes inaccurately) promise. Manifold is not a discoverability mecca. It has no centralized marketplace. It offers a great product and puts that product squarely in the hands of the artists who would use it. One can’t rankle with Manifold’s lack of artist curation, that’s not what they have ever claimed to do; in fact, the very existence of their interview-heavy blog (which only ran throughout 2025) reveals an attempt to go above and beyond their stated call of duty. Foundation, like Makersplace and KnownOrigin alongside it, promised too much: a central spot for minting, marketing, curation, tooling, etc. As we can now conclude, that was an unrealistic goal for any platform not named SuperRare. Manifold has managed to thrive by providing a best-in-class experience and committing to it, remaining hands-off elsewhere. When you have a provocateur like 787FKA casually calling Manifold “the light,” it demonstrates the level of cultural staying power they’ve maintained by being focused, delivering on what they promised, and avoiding the traps that so many greedy influencer and founder-types giddily walked into.
The Boutiques are altogether the most interesting of all, not only because they’re often still nascent, but because they’re almost uniformly narrow-minded. I mean that in a good way. Transient Labs is inheritor of Async.Art’s legacy, offering unique aesthetic tools as an incentive to mint on their platform; I don’t believe they see themselves as an emerging behemoth, but as a vital stake in the overall ecosystem. Verse is an entirely curated platform, and because of that focus, they can afford to be exceedingly well-curated. Raster is probably the greatest single threat to whatever hegemony SuperRare has built, though their fierce commitment to cataloguing every artist (complimentary) will probably make their platform more useful to scholars, writers, and critics than collectors at this point in time. Beyond Ethereum, fxHash (the generative art locale) on Tezos and Exchange.Art on Solana, while much smaller in footprint, are committed to their niche audiences; none are trying to be the next Opensea, nobody foolish enough to try mimicking SuperRare.
Towards the Boutiques’ mindset, I think, is where the ecosystem is going. Small, specific, nimble. It’s hard to know if any of these platforms will survive the next year or two, though their possible closures will likely not send shockwaves through crypto art the way all these OG deaths did. That’s not because they’re unimportant platforms, but because they help to sustain a fragmented crypto art that can not be represented or honored in its entirety. All the Boutiques, following Manifold’s example, seem to understand that underpromising and overdelivering is better than the alternative, committing themselves to work instead of hype, come what may. Artists recognize and hold dear to platforms with integrity. That is, I’d argue, why MOCA exists to this day. There is a world in which crypto art has dozens of these Boutiques, some operating like independent galleries, others offering useful but niche tools, all engaged in partnerships and uplift with one another as an admission that this is not the zero-sum game many OG platforms believed it to be. There can be more than one victor when the stakes of the game are comprehensively reduced.
As the old guard of NFT platforms vanishes almost entirely, they leave behind an ecosystem where only a few emerged from their war for supremacy. Opensea, victorious because of scope. SuperRare, victorious because of efficacy. Manifold, victorious because of specificity. And the Boutiques, all of which are stories without conclusion quite yet, but which seem victorious at the moment because they’ve absorbed the lessons of their faltering forefathers. The fact that I cannot off the top of my head name the founders of Transient, fxhash, or Verse, that is a massive step in the right direction.
Sidenote: I have no idea how Zora slots into any of this. Let’s do as I hope everyone else soon does and leave them entirely alone.
2. There is No Escape from the AI Hard Pivot
Over the past few years, it has become commonplace to see former NFT or crypto influencers reposition themselves as AI experts, following the long train of Web3 businesses who pivoted into AI when all the world’s money began to flow in that direction. “Pivot to AI” has become a meme unto itself, but perhaps no pivot has felt as abrupt, odd, and deeply fascinating as the pivot made by this week by Allbirds, a company known for making wool sneakers.
As per Lola Murti and Gabrielle Fonrouge at CNBC, “Allbirds was founded in 2015 by former professional soccer player Tim Brown and renewable resources expert Joey Zwillinger to create a new category of shoes that relied on natural materials, not plastics and other petroleum products.” And that is exactly what Allbirds did: built a multi-billion-dollar shoe company with brick-and-mortar stores in every major US city, a bustling online marketing arm, and a hallowed place in the closet of every tech/finance bro I’ve ever met. As more of a Nike guy myself, I never had much interest in Allbirds’ bland aesthetics, and it seems that, as times changed, the market lost interest too.
“Allbirds closed all its U.S. full-priced stores in February,” we learn from the CNBC article, and "between 2022 and 2025, sales plummeted nearly 50% — falling from $298 million to $152 million.” After selling “its intellectual property and other assets for $39 million last month,” Allbirds’ is now repositioning full bore towards a very unexpected kind of business model.
“[Allbirds], which according to [their press] release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
“‘[NewBird AI] will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,’ the company said…”
Allbirds’ new business model is known as GPUaaS —i.e. GPU As A Service— which is as much of a mouthful as it is likely to fizzle out in the same faltering fashion as their shoe production. Of course, we live in the era of hyper-speculative AI investment, so naturally “the move boosted shares of the minuscule market cap company — it was valued at about $21 million at Tuesday’s close — by 582%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to about $17.” My thoughts on the move aren’t overly complex, and are mostly informed by the following throwaway question within Brooke DiPalma’s write-up on the subject for YahooFinance: “How will Allbirds transform itself into an AI company? The details remain unclear…”
DiPalma goes on to say:
“Many are skeptical that the company can actually make this pivot, given its lack of a clear roadmap, staff with this expertise, or adequate funding. For the most part, Allbirds’ leadership team has deep experience in apparel, not AI, except for its chief technology officer, who served as TurboTax’s director of engineering nearly a decade ago.”
DiPalma’s is an obvious, well no shit, kind of opinion, and if you can get through their paywall, Nitish Pahwa at Slate has a nice write-up on this latest “grim trend in modern-day corporate America.” But all that is clear, right? Loading one’s sales-pitch up with AI-related buzzwords and business terminology (vague as they may be) is a sure way to incite both attention and investment. I mean, we are talking about Allbirds/NewBird today when we never otherwise would be. Speculation on AI is at an astounding fervor, concerningly so, and Allbirds is not the first, nor will it be the last, company to use AI as a last-ditch effort to drum-up funds.
It’s not the pivot, then, that is intriguing; for me, it’s the business model itself. As Allbirds seems to be saying in its above press release, the hyperscalers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, xAI, etc.) will continue taking care of the biggest clients, the enterprise level clients, the business clients, the meat of the market, and so we (Allbirds) will instead service the little people, leasing GPUs and loaning them out to small businesses, individuals, study groups, whomever. A decent idea in theory, except with even a tiny amount of attention paid to actual AI subculture, one would learn two things very quickly:
Many others companies have already been doing this successfully; and
There isn’t a growing market for it in the first place
Point 1 is easy to explicate. MOCA’s strategic partner, Comput3 AI, has been offering rented GPUs for years, as does Erik Voorhees’ Venice AI, and this blog by Io.net from October 2025 lists other companies like “io.net, Render Network, Akash, and Golem” who all offer a similar product: GPUs rented out at prices dictated by market demand, not by arbitrary dictum of C-suite execs, and so more accessible to smaller consumers. If we’re keeping count, that’s six GPU providers just in the broader crypto ecosystem who not only boast a years-long head-start on Allbirds, but an already ingrained market, preexisting functionality, and leadership teams with proven knowhow in the industry. There are copious examples of the same business model without any web3 integrations, so many that I’m not going to bother even naming them. If there is a party, Allbirds is extremely late to it.
But more so, I’m not sure there’s a party. Who is currently in the market for low-cap GPU providers and unable to find them? Does it really seem to you —from your conversations with family and friends, from inferences made after studying online discourse— that small-market AI consumers are growing in number or enthusiasm? In Thursday’s edition of the Tangle newsletter, Tangle’s Executive Editor, Isaac Saul, wrote about the national security implications of Anthropic’s ultra-hyped new model, Mythos, which they have stated is too dangerous to allow a public release. One of his asides is really instructive in our case too. Saul says:
“For now, I think it’s important to remind everyone that we’ve been here a few times already: For two years now, the AI industry has been saying that autonomous agents handling complex work with minimal supervision were about to upend the entire economy. Any day now. Two years after Claude Code was supposed to make software engineers irrelevant, the company is facing criticism that Claude’s abilities are actually degrading, perhaps because it’s hitting compute limits. Even the Mythos hype, less than a week in, is already being questioned — and the fine print in Anthropic’s own paper suggests it “can’t state with certainty” (yet) how serious some of the vulnerabilities Mythos found actually are, so we’re left waiting for more information about what, exactly, the model is actually capable of.”
Point being: We’re being told constantly that the AI market is growing exponentially, and thus many companies are readying to serve the forthcoming mega demand of smaller actors desperately seeking more access to more compute. But are they coming? The vast majority of smaller consumers —whether individuals or small businesses— will opt to use name-brand softwares, exactly that provided by the hyper-scalers. Others —devs and engineers— are assumedly already integrated into this industry, meaning they’re already paying for compute, they already have an understanding of the landscape, but worst of all for any hop-on-the-hype AI pivoteers, they are discerning.
More so, who isn’t using AI right now that will want to? It’s been over three years since ChatGPT’s formal launch. I heard a 60-year-old man reference it during his wedding speech yesterday. Do we really think there’s some latent market of soon-to-be AI users who have sufficient interest in both exploring the products to the level that they would need a high-scale GPU provider and the wherewithal to put their money into such a strange company, one without credentials, without testimonials, that won’t even be operational for months (at best) to come?
All of which is to say that Allbirds has no market. There is no market. As per Gallup, “13% of employees [are] now saying they use AI daily and 28% [report] they use it a few times a week or more.” Those clients are taken. As per a survey taken by Elon University (unrelated to Musk) in March of last year, “52% of U.S. adults now use AI large language models like ChatGPT.” Those clients are taken too. There is not a secretive cohort of forthcoming AI users waiting for some low-cap GPU providers to come along and save their day. Pivoting to AI is one thing. Pivoting to AI with no experience, no target market, no transition plan, and no hardware, that’s another thing altogether. I, for one, would be more likely to buy their shoes.
And if I had to make a prediction, it’d be that demand for footwear will outpace demand for low-cap GPU’s every year to come until AI replaces our feet too.
3. Schadenfreude Comes for Crypto’s Most Corrupt Institution
There is really no better distillation of just what a corrupt and extractive force the extended Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, is than this post right here from someone named Peter Girnus, who merely assembles public information in such a way that the seedy and sordid activities of the company are on full display:
Alas, a proper discussion of World Liberty Financial’s heinous activities —its base and cynical entrance into, extraction from, and abandonment of an industry the U.S. President spent oodles of effort courting— would take more words and research than you or I are right this second interested in. I will, however, include some helpful links so you can educated yourself before we move on.
Read this.
This.
This.
This.
and this.
Really I want to use this column to celebrate the schadenfreude we’re getting to have at the expense of $Tron founder, Justin Sun, who learned this week —in a very public, crybaby kind of way— that when you get into bed with cretins, you shouldn’t be surprised when they fuck you.
As per Krisztian Sandor at CoinDesk, “In a lengthy post on X, Sun accused [World Liberty Financial] of designing a vote that punishes dissent, with token holders who vote against the proposal risking having their tokens locked indefinitely.” Yes, that’s exactly right, apparently World Liberty Financial has invented an investment plan wherein:
“Tokens held by insiders — such as team members, advisors and partners — would face a two-year lockup followed by a three-year gradual release, alongside a 10% token burn upon opting in. Early supporters would face slightly shorter vesting terms but no burn. In total, up to 4.5 billion tokens could be permanently destroyed.
Holders who do not accept the new terms would remain locked indefinitely, per the proposal.”
Very much a “give me all your money, or I’ll shoot you in the face” type scenario.
Sun took to Twitter with a cloyingly pro-Trump post that addressed the issue directly. But that wasn’t enough to spare him World Liberty Financial’s wrath. After being mocked by the company’s own Twitter page in response, Sun wrote a much more explicitly angry takedown of the company. Their threat to “see you in court pal [sic]” was not taken lightly. Mind you, Justin Sun was the single largest investor in World Liberty Financial at its launch. But he must have outlived his usefulness, and he is now getting in the way of further corrupt profiteering. Thus, there is nothing keeping Sun from being pushed aside and swept away, lest he upset the President of the United States himself.
You don’t need expert analysis to see how fucked up this situation is, but let me relish in the schadenfreude a bit more. This situation is no different than all those dipshits who got absolute wrecked buying some stupid NFT project, or memecoin, including and especially, Trump coin. Or whoever bought those gaudy Trump-branded watches with extensive price tags and no real value. Getting close to a con-man has risks. Crying and complaining when the obvious reversal of fortune finally occurs, that’s not going to evoke sympathy. In truth, anyone who looked at World Liberty Financial and said, “I want to be in business with this,” they’re a Grade-A sucker. Worse still, they all knew exactly what they were getting into. They had all merely hoped to be on the other end of the sucker’s racket, benefitting from extraction instead of being extraction’s target. Alas, investors like Justin Sun had far less leverage than they believed. I don’t know whether they actually foolishly thought World Liberty Financial was a good investment, whether they wanted to benefit from nearness to President Trump, if they believed legislation would be written to benefit them specifically, but now they have learned the lesson all of us here in crypto art have long since internalize: there is no good-will in this place. Justin Sun and the rest of his class have learned in a very public way that all their investment knowhow, their high hopes, their free marketing, their effort, it’s all little more than a rake laid out on the ground, waiting to be stepped upon.
There’s really only one thing I can think to say to Justin Sun as I finish up here, and that is:
Welcome to the club, pal.
DeCC0 of the Week
Art in the Wild
Quote of the Week
“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”
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