Did all the NFT folks just become AI folks?
The other day I caught myself hyping an AI agent with the same breathless energy I used to hype a Solana mint, and that was the moment it clicked: I never really left the last cycle behind.
My whole timeline just swapped floor prices for agentic workflows, the same faces showing up with the same all-in conviction, only with new words for it now.
I bought my first Solana NFT sometime in early 2022, and I remember the feeling like you remember a good first date: the Solana ecosystem felt genuinely alive, a little unhinged, and full of people who were building things just to see if they could.
The Discord voice chats ran until 2am or 3am, frens riffing on floor prices and big marketing promises on project roadmaps and who was going to be the next Magic Eden hit, and there was something real in those nights even if the numbers were mostly made up.
One of my biggest wins came from Ovols NFTs, when I bought a bunch (~20) for ~1 SOL each and saw the floor run to around ~15, and I sat there watching it like you watch a good poker hand, feeling the particular warmth of being early on something that other people were just starting to notice.
And you're probably wondering by now how much I lost in all that frenzy, right?
Enough. I round-tripped the Ovols gains into seed rounds and private VC rounds that didn't pan out, which is the polite way of saying I traded a real win for a set of whitepaper promises that eventually became nothing.
I don't say this with bitterness, because I think the decision made sense at the time and I'd probably make some version of it again, but the lesson is the one every poker player learns the hard way: taking chips off the table is not a failure of conviction, it's just good math.
But moving on... Most NFT frens are still around, which turns out to be the thing that survived the round trip, (and tbh the frens I've made along the way are worth way more than a 100x flip), along with a genuine understanding of what it feels like when a narrative is running faster than the fundamentals, and how hard it is to act on that feeling in real time.
More than 40 DeFi protocols shut down in the first five months of 2026, spanning wallets, lending platforms, NFT marketplaces, and GameFi. That cycle seems to be closing fast.
But closing one chapter means starting a new one, and in the same week that list was being quietly updated, Anthropic closed a $65B Series H at a $965B valuation, surpassing OpenAI's $852B, and launched Claude Opus 4.8 the same day.
And right about here, you're probably thinking this is just the same hype wearing a different hoodie, aye?!
Some of it is, honestly. The unfalsifiable roadmaps are back, the raise sizes have gotten wilder, and I've heard "agentic workflow" used to describe things that are just cron jobs or loop routines.
But here's what's different for me personally: I've done the round trip before and learned my lesson from then, and I'm not confusing proximity to the excitement with understanding the thing again.
The frens from the Discord voice chats are building cool AI stuff now, and some of them are going to be wrong about which bets to make, and so am I, and that's fine because the question isn't whether the cycle is real but whether you're showing up to it with your eyes open 👀