Rhymes like Defi

Defines Like Structural Integrity

Most people miss the real distinction.

They focus on the what.

The protocol.

The mechanics.

The innovation.

But the real distinction is the who.

It’s people.

Always has been.

The foundational layer of my entire thesis is Adam.

I’ve known him for years.

In a previous life in this space, my skill asymmetry was simple:

I found exceptional artists well before consensus.

I bought their work for pennies.

I supported them.

I helped them get discovered.

And every single time—without exception—

there was already one wallet there.

Same wallet.

Early.

Heavily allocated.

That’s how I found Adam.

And Adam has my single non-negotiable trait:

Integrity.

People either have it—or they don’t.

If they don’t, they don’t even register as inputs.

Only as AVOID and WARN OTHERS.

At some point, I reframed NFTs as New Friend Technology.

Not speculation.

Not clout.

Not status.

Connection.

I remember buying a piece from an artist for what amounted to the cost of a dinner for two.

They DM’d me afterward and said:

“Thank you. I don’t have to worry about rent this month.”

That conversation never left me.

That was the inflection point—

when I understood the real potential of this space.

Every new technology follows the same arc.

Innovation.

Adoption.

Over-leverage.

Then extraction by misaligned actors.

NFTs were no different.

I talk about this in A Love Letter to NFTs.

Sustainability requires alignment.

Artist.

Collector.

Founder.

Break that triangle—and the ecosystem collapses.

Adam is one of maybe three people on Earth who personally know, have met, and are genuine friends with XCOPY.

And XCOPY is the most important artist in this space.

That is not opinion.

That is signal.

Across all mediums, it’s XCOPY and Banksy.

Nothing else is close.

What do they have in common?

Anonymity.

Integrity.

And systems-level signal.

They are not narrative.

They are architecture.

They provide the “wink.”

Like an M. Night Shyamalan moment.

Or the quiet unease in a Christopher Nolan film.

You feel that something is wrong.

You know something needs to change.

Most people frame that feeling through narrative.

Narratives flip.

Math does not.

Adam and XCOPY’s friendship is my thesis.

Because the foundation isn’t technology.

It’s integrity.

This isn’t really DeFi.

Those are just familiar words people use to reconcile what they’re seeing.

PNKSTR is something else.

PNKSTR is the settlement layer for digital art.

It is the settlement layer for NFTs.

CryptoPunks are the SPY of NFTs.

Where they go, the market follows.

XCOPY is our Banksy.

Combine them—and you are not buying hype.

You are buying deflationary exposure to digital culture itself.

This is the same way I explain ETH.

It’s not a coin.

It’s infrastructure.

The Internet for the AI age.

Now imagine if you could buy shares of The Internet.

Or shares of the Electrical Grid.

The utility plumbing system everything else depends on.

Not a company.

Not an application.

Not a trend.

The base layer everything else is built on.

That’s what this is.

One billion total units.

That number only goes down.

Every single day.

With a future supply shock that rhymes with:

Five-hundred-thousand-dollar Bitcoin.

Fifty-thousand-dollar ETH.

One-million-dollar Punks.

XCOPY already sells ten-of-ten editions for three-point-four million dollars.

So ask yourself—

What happens when Punks are at five hundred K…

when BTC and ETH are halfway to where they’re going…

and when XCOPY completes his sixth Max Pain burn?

Yeah.

That’s what this is.

— ICT