Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I heard for the first time of Bitcoin in 2012, as we implemented it as a payment method on WordPress.com as a project at our Automattic grand meetup (the yearly event where the whole company travels together to the same place for one week).

I developed a superficial understanding of blockchain at the time. However, it’s pretty safe to say that as a day to day payment method, Bitcoin didn’t really succeed, becoming a store of value and speculation vehicle instead.

I have little interest in such things, and I mostly ignored the whole thing for a few years.

Later Ethereum based smart contracts triggered my interest again, and while the term NFT wasn’t popular yet, I played a bit the then-new blockchain; I even have a couple CryptoKitties like this one…

I didn’t find the exercise much enjoyable, and once more, after a brief exploration, I moved on.

Sometimes, you need to look at something from different angles before you start understanding its interest. Earlier this year, when suddenly everyone was talking about NFTs, my interest was piqued once more.

For the first time, I was looking at web3 tools like tools. Not the third-millennium version of the Tulip mania or Beanie Babies, and not a game based on virtual kitties.

Tools that allow random entities to enter into transactions with each other without a central authority to guarantee the validity of the transactions or their persistency. Ownership certificates for the digital world, the Metaverse, if you will.

I started reading and listening, and shapes began appearing from the fog. So much that, I’ll be frank, that’s where most of my free time has gone in the past few weeks (to be honest, I didn’t have that much, to begin with, life got a bit in the way as it does). So, today I don’t have much to write except this, as a teaser of posts to come, where I’ll try to bring you along in my discovery of NFTs, ENS, DAOs and a non-negligible number of related projects and apps.

I’ll add links to this post as I publish the next ones.