You can measure cryptocurrency's impact in money terms, and that's certainly impressive. With a market cap of $2.2 trillion, crypto is now an asset class to be reckoned with.

But you can also see the industry's influence in more qualitative ways. 2021 was the year crypto became a mainstream cultural phenomenon as much as an interesting experiment in money.

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Neil Strauss Pens the Bored Ape Yacht Club 'Tell-All'

What, exactly, does it mean to write a "memoir" about a group of NFT avatars that kind of exists but kind of doesn't? "That's up to the community," Strauss tells me. And this is literally the case. Through a clever use of NFTs within the BAYC ecosystem, the Apes can purchase the right to enter the ...

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Infinite Games: How Crypto Is 'LARPing'

Crypto communities are playing a big series of "live action role playing games," and they're changing how we organize and interact across digital and physical spaces. At the 2018 "Devcon" Ethereum Developers Conference in Prague, internet guru and self-proclaimed "culture hacker" Stewart Brand shared the book that changed his life ...

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This week we survey the building blocks of this new creator economy, including NFTs. We look at DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) like Friends With Benefits. We take the temperature of the Wall Street Bets-level enthusiasm of creative communities like ConstitutionDAO. And, yes, we hurtle headlong into the metaverse.

We see how consumer brands are soaking up crypto culture, and how artists are making use of its tools and distribution.

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