Aniket Handa

For the past few months, I have been working on a cool NFT project. I can say it involves: 🌌 Astronomy, 📝 Data-driven, and 🖼 Generative Art.

DM me if you're interested in learning and potentially lead Marketing efforts for this project!

wagmi

Fast fashion has made us addicted to fashion on a mass scale. Now in the digital age, this 2 trillion-dollar industry is going to be unleashed from its physical chains – here is why:

⏰ More time spent online

In 2020, adults in the USA spent an estimated average of 7 hours and 50 minutes with digital media each day; out of which 2 hours and 25 minutes were spent on social media.

Spending more time online directly corresponds to expressing more online. This trend can be seen in the rise of purchases of in-game skins, NFTs and other digital goods.

♻️ Sustainable

Digital fashion address the same expressive wants without killing the planet.

A digital fashion item has a 97% lower carbon footprint than the physical equivalent. This expands the market to include environmentally conscious individuals who want to express themselves.

Sustainability makes sure we can indulge in guilt-free fashion.

🎨 Artistic freedom

Lower barrier to entry and not bound to physical laws.

You don't need to be a fashion designer or need capital to produce physical collections. Cost to produce a 3D asset is much lower and gives rise to creative freedom unseen in the physical domain.

✨ Expressive freedom

Not bound to the physical limits of your body.

Want to experience dressing up differently than your identity, gender or even species? Go ahead, you can be anyone or anything.

😎 Not just Virtual Reality

Digital fashion will also augment reality.

Augmented Reality filters are already deployed on social media. Apple is supposed to release AR glasses in a couple of years, further expanding this area. Imagine walking around and seeing folks in their digitally chosen clothing.

💼 Unique Business Models

Blockchain is giving rise to new ways to make money.

Being digital native digital clothes are already being sold as NFTs which gives rise to business models such as artists getting paid upon when the item is resold or is paid per view in the Metaverse.

🧱 Dematerialization

No physical material means zero marginal cost, zero return cost (currently topmost problem for retailers), no size problems, takes no physical closet space. No logistic or shipping delay means it acts like any other digital media and can reach consumers instantly giving rise to viral tendencies.

Fashion has been entangled with clothing since time immemorial. But it need not be, as fashion is a form of human expression while clothing is a human need. Fashion uses clothing to express in the material age but not in the digital age.

They say buy a home. They say buy another one and put in on rent. Repeat.

I did the same and bought two properties over the last 4 years, enough to get a taste of it. What I learned is that unless real estate is your primary profession it's one of the worst investments that can cost you your freedom.

🦕 Undiversified

A home is a highly undiversified asset.

We obsess over diversification of our stocks and bonds, and then on the other hand buy a single piece of property which is directly affected by so many changing factors (development next door, climate change, city, taxes, schools, neighborhood, transportation).

💰 Illiquid & High Transaction Costs

Imagine Robinhood takes 4 months and 6% when you sell your stocks.

You can't buy or sell real estate with a click of a button. It locks you to months (sometimes years) long lengthy periods depending upon market conditions. Moreover the transaction costs are high, especially the money that goes to buyers' and sellers' agents.

🪨 Geo Binding

Creates more missed opportunities by forcing you to settle down.

It's not just illiquidity and high transaction costs that deter you from moving, it's the hassle of moving all the stuff you have acquired. It subconsciously takes away the choice to say yes to that out of state job.

📉 Low returns

Long-term avg. real estate returns trail that of S&P500 index.

Historically, residential real estate made an avg 3% gain or less, while its around 8% for a diversified index fund. You might get lucky during a boom, but you don't make a real profit unless you sell it and don't buy another more expensive home.

🏃 Not Passive

We have all heard stories of things breaking down.

You must deal with contractors, rental churn, HOA, etc. If you want to outsource it, rental management companies take between 8-10%, there goes your profit. You don't even get all the tax breaks if you're not actively participating.

What to do instead?

I understand the obsession with real estate. It's not just about shelter; it's a permanent place that holds our most prized possessions; it's where memories are made; it's a legacy we build.

Buy a home for personal consumption, not for investment.

If you'd like to have real estate as an asset class in your portfolio, look for REITs instead. They come without any of the above cons, and you can also double down on a sector type (residential, commercial, healthcare, etc.).

We dominate the earth because we can create and deploy Myths (religions, governments, money, etc.). These Myths help us achieve exceptional level of cooperation.

"Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories." - Yuval Noah Harari

Myth-making depends upon communication technology between human minds. Technology provides mechanisms for trust, knowledge storage and transfer of information, which are fundamental to these Myths.

Spoken language gave us the way to effectively communicate one-to-one in a synchronous manner resulting in myths of tribes and prehistoric religions.

Writing gave us the way to store and retrieve knowledge asynchronously. Not just that, marked/signed documents provided trust, it's what civilizations, laws and countries are built on.

The printing press gave the means of mass communication from N-to-many, giving rise to large-scale democracies and companies.

Until this time, transmission of information was dependent upon encoding it on matter (books, using pens, etc.) and physically moving that matter. Now, the information age completely changes that by just moving electrons. The Internet and mobile phones for the first time have given us cheap means to communicate many-to-many.

We are just getting started

Connecting everyone doesn't create the next level of cooperation. More than 90% of people online are lurkers, so we clearly haven't figured out the true many-to-many medium yet. Imagine going to a party and 90% of people don't participate.

What will be the technology for many-to-many communication that comes as easily as spoken language or reading? Something that inherently feels human.

What does trust look like in this medium?

What kinds of new Myths will this technology enable?

We are all told, explicitly or implicitly, that we should make money first and then live that lifestyle that we forever dreamed of.

On its surface it makes sense, we need money to live that lifestyle otherwise it's simply financially irresponsible. But with this mantra we end up slaving away our lives and never living that lifestyle, or even worse we retire early and have no idea what to do next.

Let's start with breaking down Money and Lifestyle:

💰 Why Make More Money?

“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.” — Bob Marley.

We usually just want more money without thinking about what we really want money to do for us. At the end, money is a resource that enables things. It's an enabler. Also, money is a measure of time. We trade our time for money. We invest according to Time Value of Money. The question really is:

👉 What do we want to enable from our limited time?

🕺 Living That Lifestyle!

We confuse "lifestyle" with a luxurious lifestyle (thanks Instagram). A lifestyle need not always require a ton of money. We can scale down the luxuries and still enjoy a lifestyle. Living in a monastery is a lifestyle; suburban 9 to 5 is a lifestyle; van life is a lifestyle; nomadic is a lifestyle. Not just that it can be based on identity, sexual orientation, music, health, sports, etc. Of course, for an individual they merge and create a unique lifestyle.

Thanks to the options provided by open markets, any of these lifestyles can be explored/lived irrespective of the amount of money. Don't forget using social capital is also an option.

✨ Live that lifestyle first and then make money to make it better ✨

Step #1: Rethink your current lifestyle. Is it keeping you content?

Step #2: Figure out what different lifestyles you'd like to test.

Step #3: Use (or make) a minimum amount of money to test a few lifestyles that you're excited about.

Step #4: Creatively use that lifestyle to make money to permanently enable that minimum lifestyle.

Step #5: Keep creating within that lifestyle for a better one.

For example: If you want that farm life, start with working on a farm, then maybe write or teach about farming. The trick is that when we are using that lifestyle to make money it is organically motivating. The hope is the result is a more fulfilled life.

Why would someone want to think about such morbid stuff first thing in the morning? I'd say, once we accept the fact that death is certain and not something to be afraid of, we can use it as a tool to live intentionally.

🙏 Builds Gratitude

Death is definite, while life is highly improbable.

When awake, we live in a dream acting as if we are invincible; but this cannot be further from the truth. Not a single person, no matter how legendary, has defeated death. On the other hand, it's so easy to forget how unlikely and fragile life is. Death reminds us how lucky we are to have yet another day. It makes us appreciate our ancestors for the lives they lived.

👉 Today is a gift without any guarantee.

✅ Work Towards Achieving Goals

Death recenters what we want to do today.

Reflecting on death makes us go deep on our long-term goals, legacy we want to leave, the people we care about, and regrets we don't want to have. It helps us prioritize what matters. Thinking about it every day aligns how today plays a tiny yet compounding role in achieving those long-term goals.

👉 Does today's schedule match with what I want out of this life/gift?

☀️ Why Mornings?

It's simply the best time to reflect and make change.

Right after we wake up our mind is still relatively calm. We haven't been exposed to thoughts arising from social media, work, people and just life in general. Moreover, the day is still ahead of us and whatever comes out of the exercise, we still have the means to redesign the day.

👉 Today is still within reach.

Try reflecting on death for 5 mins in the morning, be curious about what arises, and how it can help towards living a more intentional life.

AR/VR has suffered from lack of easy capture, creation, discovery, and consumption of spatial content. Let's see how these bottlenecks are evolving, giving rise to novel opportunities:

Cheaper Hardware

For capture, we now have a LiDAR sensor included in all iPhones since 12 Pro. For consumption, Oculus Quest 2 headsets are available starting at just $299. Apple is rumored to launch two headsets in the next couple of years. Meanwhile, flood gates are open for other vendors to use Qualcomm XR chips.

Established Open Standards

The last AR/VR hype cycle gave rise to Open Standards that are now ripe to create compatible and interoperable solutions. I'm talking about OpenXR, WebXR, glTF, ERC-721 (NFTs)?, etc. glTF file format is literally called "jpeg of 3D".

Powerful Platforms

Platforms and frameworks have kept up with what hardware and open standards can support. Apple and Google are only doubling down on their respective AR frameworks. Unity and Unreal game engines are offering even more compelling options. Microsoft Azure & Amazon AWS isn't far behind to power these behind the scenes.

Wider Distribution

A whole new category of AR creation and discovery is on a growth trend; I'm talking about Instagram and Snapchat filters. Away from the traditional App Store model, these new ways have created an innovative marketing channel. I'm curious how far these filters will go; in a way creating "game/app" under these "super-apps".

The job of an NFT is to simply assign metadata to you. This metadata lives on the blockchain, but not necessarily the assets (jpegs, etc.). Now, it's important to know if these assets are immutable and decentralized. This is to make sure no one can modify an already minted NFT.

With that, let's find out how to get this metadata:

📖 Step 1: Get the Contract Address

You can easily find the contract address of your NFT on its OpenSea URL. Using Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as an example, it should look like:

0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d

🔍 Step 2: Go to Etherscan.io

Replace the contract address from the step above in the following URL and it should take you to the Read Contract section. In BAYC example, we go to:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d#readContract

🔗 Step 3: Get the Metadata!

Under Read Contract section, head to tokenURI and enter tokenId (this could be your NFT id or someone else's) and hit the Query button. This will return the metadata. This is what you paid for! In the BAYC example, we get this external link by using 42 as tokenId:

ipfs://QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3jxcaWtq/42

🔥 Step 4: Read Metadata & Assets

This step depends upon metadata type. Most popular projects (BAYC, Doodles, etc.) use InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to store data. To access IPFS using your browser, you can append IPFS content address end of https://ipfs.io/ipfs/. So, to read BAYC #42 metadata go to:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeSjSinHpPnmXmspMjwiXyN6zS4E9zccariGR3jxcaWtq/42

This should return a JSON blob with IPFS image link and traits of the Ape #42. To get the image, simply use https://ipfs.io/ipfs/ again.

👇 Full resolution link to the BAYC #42 image👇

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmdVqrjbXLnxNy9ifPAq1pnD4vhgtkfFzhX2ixyxUM7Dqf

Now that we have the metadata. In Part 2, I will mention various storage methods (yes, better than IPFS) and how safe they are.

I quit my job at the start of this year, and I have none lined up. Before you guess, I wasn't burned out or paid below the market rate. On the contrary, I quite enjoyed my job. The weird thing is good jobs are not designed to be risky enough to give that adrenaline rush, which makes you go beyond your comfort zone...

Simply put: It was time to take more risks! Start something of my own and go nomadic!

That was me, but why should you take risks?

Calculated risks ➡ possibly more rewards ➡ guaranteed less long-term regret

The idea is to introduce calculated risk to be uncomfortable and reduce future regret. Rewards are a byproduct, which might not necessarily be financial.

🤞Risk

A risk could be any drastic change in your life. They are dependent upon risk-tolerance and safety net. Keeping the risk-tolerance constant, one can take more risks if there is a better safety net. I mean, you could take more risk if you have $100,000 as compared to $50,000 in savings. You could be more willing to explore your sexuality if you have better emotional support.

In this ideal case, Risk is directly proportional to Safety Net.

Typically, risk tolerance tends to decrease when one starts building a better safety net. That's when we get comfortable. The trick is to be aware of this.

🔒 Safety Net

Safety net stands on top of financial & emotional support on one side and talent & learned experience on the other side. This evaluation is unique to everyone. It could consider the following:

✅ Savings, investments, passive income, spouse (income, health insurance)

✅ Work experience (ease of getting a job)

⏺ Health and relationships

🔽 Leverage (loans, etc.), liability (insurance, assets, dependents)

🤩 All while having fun

Isn't it all a game anyway? If you're not having fun taking risks, then it's not worth it. In that case, reevaluate your risk tolerance or increase your safety net before taking that risk.

Are you taking the appropriate amount of Risk that your Safety Net enables?

The term "Metaverse" was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his influential cyberpunk book Snow Crash. Now almost three decades later, it has become essential to have a conversation about what we collectively envision as Metaverse; and to establish a set of core requirements where if you remove even one of them it ceases to be Metaverse but becomes something else.

These requirements help us understand: How far away are we in realizing a true Metaverse? What benefits and drawbacks should we anticipate? Which projects or companies to invest in?

With that, let's dive into the fundmental requirements of Metaverse:

1. There is only one Metaverse

Just like the Internet, there is only one Metaverse. No single company can build or control the Metaverse.

2. Open 

No or low barrier to entry and exit. Easy to build and consume "walled gardens" that become part of the Metaverse.

3. Interoperable

Uses interoperable standards for identity, payment, ownership, assets, logic, and hardware requirements.

4. Persistent shared reality

Provides a persistent shared reality between users. Otherwise, we lean toward a Multiverse where a user or a group can have their own reality.

5. Embodiment

Offers immersive extended reality (AR/VR) to bring the highest sense of presence and embodiment.

6. Hardware-independent

Gracefully degrades to the best experience supported by the given hardware.

7. Abundant

There is no artificial scarcity in the Metaverse. I add this requirement as I distastefully look at "rare" virtual plots of land.

In short, it's the next generation of the Internet :)