thanks for your thoughts. i'm caffeinated and going to give you mine. we created bored ape to scratch an itch we put em up for minting at $200 a pop, and a flat rate, which was different at the time over that summer we just put everything we had into being welcoming and growing the community, and trying to make BAYC a way for regular people to experience and experiment with crypto (nfts for access to digital spaces, nfts for access to physical goods, nfts for wacky treasure hunts, nfts for insane in person concerts, nfts for mobile game competitions with the top prize being a stinky honda accord) i don't control prices but with the optimism and growth in the macro, the feeling that there was always some new crazy dopamine waiting to hit, that some anons who don't sleep were cooking something wild up on the new frontier of the internet resonated with the market imo and royalties made it all work the result was one of the best performing assets in the history of the world - for a truly insane year but when you succeed, you need to put something aside for the devil lil tax paid in cash/energy/relationships to deal with conspiracy theories, cilckbait journo's doxxing leading to armed men showing up at your door, people who you trusted wanting to carve you up, people who made millions from the nfts just flat out losing their minds, the old admin deciding hey lets just kill and debank all crypto in the usa, every web2 social media platform on earth getting hacked left and right leading to even more phishing scams, partners that you thought you could depend on going awol because you paid them too much money, every copypasta baby ape/otter/creature club thing running away with $2m two-three times a week, and all the stuff that happened in late 2022 (FTX, Luna, Celsius, 3AC, etc.) overall your take seems to be that we should have just paused at the september/october 2021 version of bayc and yuga but the apecoin drop you think fondly of was received on the back of a lot, lot more, and also anticipated us all going out to do more, surprise more, delight more doing that requires scale. but we tried to scale the company and we couldn't find the talent to depend on bored apes in the community were making millions just shitposting, so why would they come work here, and deal with psycho trolls and insatiable needs? hiring the best in the web2 biz didn't work - literally would have made 10x the progress if i had just put figge in charge day 1 of otherside and closed my eyes and the reality here is yuga hasn't extracted shit, we've poured every drop of energy into growing the pie but the infinite free shit glitch of 2021 kinda depends on royalties absent them, you literally have founders of what were one of the top 5 NFT projects shamelessly posting on the TL today about how every NFT project should just shut down and dip the reason why one of the longest standing crypto institutions is inversebrah is because our industry suffers from the opposite of survivorship bias people are so quick to forget everybody who cashed out and dipped that we invented a mythological freezer frog thing to remember for us, because it's impossible otherwise we have people who raised for their nft project at north of a half billy valuation literally don't have it in their twitter bios anymore and its all g instead we bemoan those who show up every day despite whatever the conditions are to kick in somebody's head and build you have to have a screw loose to do this, there is no easy way, period. you have to be willing to bet on a long enough time horizon, you win because basically almost no founder in crypto actually thinks that way.

Come hang next week in Otherside. We're going to try to break the world record for the most players in a FPS battle. Record is around 1500. Let's crush it. Will token-gate to NFT holders for first 15 min, then we let it rip so anyone can try Otherside.