I had the pleasure of hanging out with a few of our wayward Higher Order Readers this weekend. And, while I appreciated the empirical evidence that we’re not just shouting into an empty void, I was taken aback to learn some of you are sticking with our little letter without understanding what the hell we’re talking about half the time.

I can’t say I was surprised to hear our Burgessian IYKYK prose style is inaccessible to some. But I was, pleasantly so, to find that even crypto skeptics see value in what we’re doing. Perhaps it’s because we occupy a particularly of-our-time Internet niche I like to call ‘Blockchainfreude’ — or ‘web2.5’ if you don’t get harm-joy from needlessly complex compound German words. Web2.5 consists of companies, publications, and properties like our own, dedicating precious time and energy to talking about and working with web3, even if we find it to be, in the immortal words of The RZA, fucken rudiccullus. 

In addition to our oft-shared friends over at Web3 Is Going Great and Garbage Day, authors like Max Read and Ted Gioia are consistently hard at work removing polish from ERC-721-secured turds and shining light on the silver linings in a space many find to be blissfully ignorant at best and scam-shilling / planet-killing at worst. Although web3 is clearly unpalatable to a majority of the population, I’d argue it’s a good thing some of us are willing to engage with this inevitable paradigm shift regardless. We need open, adaptable minds working to solve the problems we face — not just another meme account to articulate the human race’s hopeless trajectory in a somewhat witty way. 

Of course, one look at our featured image and you can see ‘just’ is the operative word there. Enter Blockchainfreude, which aims to accomplish both. We seek to engage with the best elements of the blockchain and scoff at the other 96% — an angle justified not just by you all, our cherished H0Rs, but by the NFT market at large.

Some of the buzziest NFT artists use their platform to make statements on the sorry state of crypto culture. We previously spotlighted Nick Bax’s project criticizing OpenSea’s data vulnerability. Then there’s the Super Fungible Token, designed to remind us that the photos associated with an NFT can be changed at any time. And, in a few days, we’ll see the launch of the latest from performance artist Schl0ms. Schl0ms is a web2.5 creator most famous for blowing up a toilet and selling the fragments as NFTs, which is about as deft and obvious a metaphor as I’ve ever seen.

Earlier this month, Schl0ms blew up another unsubtle symbol — this time a literal Lambo — as an FU to the con men and cash grabbers who see the market as little more than an IRL GTA: Online cheat code. That the artist stands to make millions off the 888 minted shards of the car is, I assume, irony as a poetic device. Point is, it’s only a matter of time before Blockchainfreude goes mainstream. But we’re very thankful for all of you who knew us before we were cool.