Ok after a few extra weeks of seeing how the cores thing has rolled out, watching community engagement and having more discussions here's my take; To preface, this is not a hit piece against Evan. His art looks good, he's clearly skilled and talented. This is not a personal attack, this is simply an opinion piece on the Cores collection being randomly shoehorned into our community.
There is only ONE nft collection is SPX6900. That's Project Aeon. Deal with it.
If we want to inject another NFT into the community then that will be decided & overseen by people with better opinions than me. A new collection is a serious undertaking with serious repercussions. Evan paid no respect to that.
Evan never asked for permission, he never brought up the conversation, he never mentioned his NFT's would be a PFP collection until he dropped them on launch.
Why? Because he knew the answer would be no. There's a difference between art piece NFT's and PFP collections. I thought he'd be laucnhing the former, not the latter considering the art he was posting leading up to the launch. ( He knew what he was doing )
He launched first, asked for forgiveness later.
There's been many times I've brought up launching another collection of updated Aeons, twitter banners or nendroids on Solana etc. Extra funding for treasury, secondary benefits for holders, royalties can pay for workers etc etc.
Do you know what the answer has always been? No.
And rightfully so. Launching extra nft collections is a massive undertaking with a swathe of potentially negative outcomes and new workloads to give them the attention they deserve.
If Aeons deeply tied into spx and / or treasury can't launch extra nft collections then why should a random person be able to come in and do it???
If Evan can do it then you know what that means? Everyone can do it. EVERYBODY now has permission to launch an NFT collection which should be accepted by the community. Is that what we want? Is that healthy for our longevity? So now, Aeons have zero defense against any random person coming into OUR space and telling us that their coin / collection is SPX coded.
Do you know one of the reasons why Remilia / Milady has performed somewhat poorly over the years? They let anyone and everyone launch derivative upon derivative of Milady, fracturing and redirecting liquidity away from the original collection. Pursuit of artistic rights, rebellion against IP ownership and freedom of creation was the ethos that let many artists in Remilia ( or outside of it ) launch their own versions of Milady. Their noble cause ending up screwing over the price of the original collection. We must nip this in the bud before our forest gets overgrown by weeds.
Evan has only ever sporadically shown up in SPX over the years and everytime he has, the only work he's ever contributed was petalheadz gif's with minimal SPX or Aeon inclusion. Just enough so it could blend in and not get deleted.
It has always been HIS project and a minuscule amount of SPX included and the SPX included isn't even that SPX coded. It just exists in HIS artwork so he can market his work at US because he just likes SPX. If he wanted to contribute, he would've been making pure SPX art like the rest of us, not SPX being the afterthought included in his own project.
It's the same thing with Cores. They are HIS project that has NOTHING to do with us, He's simply marketing them AT us by launching them bound with SPX. Again, Evan AFAIK hasn't explicitly stated that Cores should be accepted as an SPX6900 NFT. It's just that SPX has been slapped onto his own personal project and some Aeons have shared their opinion that they should be accepted as such.
"Look, Petalheadz is linked to SPX6900, Look Cores are linked to SPX6900. Aeons, come give MY stuff attention and liquidity." This might not be Evans intentions, but it can come across that way. In the current maket, would a new NFT launch be successfull without a large community already backing it? Just launch it tied to an already existing one right?
It's coat tail riding off of other peoples great work.
If Evan was an Aeon, we would have seen him do countless hours of FREE LABOR FOR SPX like everyone else over the years. You would have seen him in groupchats, on spaces etc etc. Even if he was a deeply entwined community member and asked for permission to launch his NFT collection, the answer would have been "Sure, but they have absolutely NOTHING to do with SPX and if you try parasite attack / fracture our community you will be socially extradited for trying to extract from what we've built". The same way we should treat people who launch derivative coins and try poach our community members. If there is a new SPX6900 NFT, It won't be launched randomly by someone who's name we only know because he incessantly name drops himself and his other projects at any chance possible. It would be a clear and direct initiative done by the Aeons who have been here since day one, pouring their entire life into flipping the stock market. It would be taken extremely seriously as to avoid the negative repercussions from fucking it up. That's why it hasn't been done yet, because SPX6900 is in safe hands who understand the nuances of the industry.
Evan might be a good guy, I'm sure. But I'm not just going to stand here and let someone wander into our community, plant a flag on our soil, market their work towards us and then claim that their work is now integral to our community when ABSOLUTELY NOBODY ASKED FOR IT. If one person can do it and get away with it, then anybody can.
If Evan Hilton, an objective nobody within SPX community who has never contributed anything meaningful to our cause can launch a collection, then why can't I?
Why can't I launch a collection?
Why can't Arcane launch a collection?
I'm 31 and living off beans and rice in my Mothers shed, I'd love to get some extra pocket money so I could actually afford to buy SPX again.
Why can't K9 or any of the other notable artists within our space, who have contributed massively to the cause over the years launch a new PFP collection? We can't do it, But Evan can? We've given everything to this cause but Evan doesn't have to play by the same rulebook we have to?
Cores ARE NOT SPX and they will NEVER be SPX. This is EXACTLY how any parasitical attack looks like. ( not saying Evan intentionally did this )
This might not be the playbook that Evan is running, but what Evan has done has opened a floodgate for anyone else to do the same as him. But many of the first movers with this newfound permission will be malicious actors looking to extract and destroy us.
Again, Evan is probably not a bad guy with extraction on his mind. But his actions have been selfish and un-thoughtfull towards the potential repercussions towards OUR community he purportedly want's to support. If he loved and wanted to support SPX then he would have been making actual SPX coded art for the past years and buying & promoting Project Aeon, Like the rest of us have been. Not just showing up on a random week with a clearly articulated marketing scheme to get attention from Aeons and "blend in" before launching an NFT collection 2 weeks later, supported by the protocol he used to do it. Remember, the protocol he used to do it got free attention from us as well. Is that an orchestrated plan I detect?
He's not an Aeon, he just wanted to launch a collection in tandem with a protocol that lets you launch an NFT bound to a coin. He chose SPX because he likes us and see's us as a strong community he can get attention from.
And he was right, his plan worked and so many Aeons lapped it up.
The best thing to come from Cores was this discussion to happen instead of / before anything actually worse happened in the same vein. Such as an aggressive faction within SPX that holds more trust launching their own collection and claiming the same turf. "We don't like Aeons or your power structure, so we launched SPX Lions, deal with it, we're an official collection now and will market ourselves as such".
Many people in SPX have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on Aeons over the years. I personally am extremely underwater on my position, I have given countless Aeons away, I've spent thousands of dollars buying peoples Aeons back after they got drained / lost everything. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars turning some into vtubers. And that's JUST me. That's not counting the work, money and time so many others have poured into building up Project Aeon into such a recognizable collection. But sure, piss all that away because some people in SPX don't quite like Aeons but happily call themselves one. To me, Aeons aren't perfect, I would change stuff if I could. But we can't change them, so suck it up and work with the amazing collection we have, even if you don't own any or don't like them.
Please don't degrade the work and life savings we've all put into Aeons by letting an objective nobody stroll in and claim Cores and Aeons are one in the same. SPX should not harbor a sub community who "might" get a few more people to buy a little bit of SPX, in exchange for them to be able to rock up to events and promote buying Cores instead of Aeons, because they're "Members of SPX and Cores are an SPX6900 NFT". The name SPX6900 carries alot more weight than many of us realize and these new, selfish people can fuck it up by arrogantly trying to claim our work as their own. What do they get from associating with us? What do we receive in return? Why do we owe the Cores any of the industry respect we've created for ourselves? We don't.
Sounds like a self centered endeavor on Evans part. He wanted US to become apart of HIS community. Not Him becoming apart of OUR community. He wanted US to promote HIS work, more so than HIM promoting OURS. We're flipping the stock market, keep your focus on the goal because it's a large undertaking and the job aint even close to finished. Stop being distracted by new and shiny things because you're desperate to see growth. There will be hiccups, mistakes, adversaries, extractors and weak links in the chain who need to be cut so they don't bring us all down with them.
Hyp3 opinion piece over, Thankyou for reading another word wall.
