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The Best of Metaversal 2025

A curated holiday recap of some of the best Metaversal posts from 2025.

Dec 30, 2025 • 7 min read

With the year coming to a close, here’s a curated look back at my 12 favorite Metaversal pieces from 2025. These posts highlight the onchain experiments, tools, and cultural happenings that most stood out to me. A small holiday rewind before we head into 2026!

The Hyperfy Example

Hyperfy’s v2 shift toward free, open, and abundant virtual land was a clean break from the speculative land traps of the 2021 metaverse cycle. By rejecting artificial scarcity at the platform level, Hyperfy reframed virtual worlds as expressive, user-driven spaces rather than financialized real estate. The post situates this move as a blueprint for where metaversal experiences are heading.

Ethereum Permanent Art Collection

Should the Ethereum Foundation become a long-term cultural steward by curating a permanent onchain art collection? In this piece, I argued that Ethereum’s greatest artistic strength lies in hypersculptures and conceptual works that treat the chain itself as a medium, not just a marketplace. The post framed such a collection, with 5 of my personal suggestions for good inclusion candidates, as one way to formalize Ethereum’s cultural legacy.

PXL DEX

One of the most interesting cryptoart releases this year was PXL DEX by Kim Asendorf. The collection fused NFTs and ERC-20s into a single, fully onchain artwork in unprecedented fashion, with collectors tasked with actively shaping the visual density of their NFTs via token flows. This article explored the project as an early example of how tokens can be used toward new collaborative ends in onchain art.

To Coin or Not to Coin

In early 2025, Zora shifted from deploying users' content as NFTs to fungible. It was one of the big highlights or lowlights of the year depending on who you ask in crypto's creative scene. Accordingly, this article broke down the case for and against content coins from conversations I'd seen around the onchain creator community.

Self-Publishing Onchain

I dropped an NFT-gated poetry book on Rarible on Jan. 3, 2021, and I think I might've been the first person in the world to do that. Anyways, I've long been interested in the possibilities of publishing longform content onchain. This post walked through how exactly you might go about publishing a book using modern crypto resources.

How I'd Build an NFT Marketplace

Will the next great NFT marketplace won’t look like a marketplace? In this article, I argued maybe not and sketched out a hypothetical curation-first platform centered on creative tools and social discovery, with buying and selling being secondary. Since I wrote this, Corners, a new curation resource, has arrived in this ballpark, which has been cool to see.

Tokenized Pokémon Card Platforms

This piece mapped out the surging ecosystem of platforms bringing Pokémon cards onchain through tokenization + digital gacha "pack rip" mechanics. Therein I broke down the basics of the major players in this niche across Ethereum, Solana, Base, and beyond.

PunkStrategy 101

I'm proud of this article, as it's a great example of my bread and butter: showing readers cool things early. This primer on PunkStrategy (which has since expanded into the TokenStrategy ecosystem) came out two days after the project launched, and then the PNKSTR token went on an incredible run over the ensuing month, peaking at a $268M market cap. I'll keep hunting for gems like this in my 2026 coverage.

Bitcoin's NFT Schism Is Intensifying

Bitcoin’s simmering NFT debate escalated in late 2025 into open governance tension, with renewed soft fork chatter echoing the block size wars of 2017. This piece traced how changes in Bitcoin Core reignited critics' complaints against Ordinals and other metaprotocols like Runes. Accordingly, what started as a technical dispute is now a cultural fight for the future of Bitcoin.

Warplet Mint Frenzy

A playful meme centered around Farcaster’s wallet ignited one of the app's biggest NFT moments of the year. This post explored how a simple mini app remixing user PFPs into "Warplets" triggered a surge in mints, trading volume, and Farcaster Pro subscriptions overnight. If nothing else, the episode is a case study in how light onchain tools can be used to achieve activity breakthroughs.

Recovering Tokens from Compromised Wallets

EIP-7702 quietly introduced the possibility of a rescue primitive for Ethereum users dealing with compromised wallets + sweeper bots. By letting EOAs behave like smart contract wallets, the upgrade enables batch transactions that can slip past sweepers and evacuate stranded NFTs and airdrops. It's an example of how protocol-level UX improvements can materially improve users’ worst-case outcomes.

The Autonomous Forest

This piece examined terra0’s "Autonomous Forest" as an experiment in collective ecological stewardship coordinated via Ethereum. Rather than tokenizing land for speculation, the project uses NFTs as stewardship markers and governance keys for a protected forest outside Berlin. It's a great example of crypto being used not to extract value, but to organize long-term care in the real world!

Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

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