The Slop Is the Signal

NFTs were written off as a joke, then quietly became real infrastructure. AI in credit unions is following the same arc, and the industry is reading it wrong.

In October 2021, a cartoon ape sold for $3.4 million. It was a JPEG, one of the Bored Ape Yacht Club images, auctioned at Sotheby's. Anyone could right-click and save the same file for nothing. Celebrities adopted the apes as profile pictures. Within a year the market had collapsed, and the apes became the reference point for everything hollow about the crypto era, proof for most people that NFTs had been a con from the start.