Onchain Summit San Francisco

Nah bruh, his roommate is whoever he thinks he is 😂🔥

In 3 days, a crypto-native IP ventures into the real world. Not another collaboration or energy play. A permanent stamp. Into a world where success can’t be manufactured. Or gamified. An arena where a work is judged simply by merit. In 2021, Aku started as one-minute animations on Nifty Gateway, so animated content would’ve been the logical step. But that always felt… empty to us (Durk and I). Books… especially middle grade books are challenging. It’s a genere where you have to out compete companies spending billions of dollars to keep 8-12 year olds glued to screens. Which tbh, is precisely why I chose this route. As a parent, I feel a shift coming. One not led by YouTube or TikTok. But one rooted in analog and human connection. One that encourages healthy discourse between two imaginative minds arguing to about what a particular scene looks like without a beautiful render to reference. And to be clear, there is no backup plan for Aku. Every egg is in this basket. I know from my baseball days, you cannot do something great while hedging your bets. For 3 years, despite the outcry of people telling us to chase the latest “metas”, we worked relentlessly to build a vibrant universe with our own fresh twist. I hope you enjoy Aku: Journey to Ibra or at the very least, appreciate the path we chose. 📅 March 3 | Most anywhere books are sold

In 3 days, a crypto-native IP ventures into the real world. Not another collaboration or energy play. A permanent stamp. Into a world where success can’t be manufactured. Or gamified. An arena where a work is judged simply by merit. In 2021, Aku started as one-minute animations on Nifty Gateway, so animated content would’ve been the logical step. But that always felt… empty to us (Durk and I). Books… especially middle grade books are challenging. It’s a genere where you have to out compete companies spending billions of dollars to keep 8-12 year olds glued to screens. Which tbh, is precisely why I chose this route. As a parent, I feel a shift coming. One not led by YouTube or TikTok. But one rooted in analog and human connection. One that encourages healthy discourse between two imaginative minds arguing to about what a particular scene looks like without a beautiful render to reference. And to be clear, there is no backup plan for Aku. Every egg is in this basket. I know from my baseball days, you cannot do something great while hedging your bets. For 3 years, despite the outcry of people telling us to chase the latest “metas”, we worked relentlessly to build a vibrant universe with our own fresh twist. I hope you enjoy Aku: Journey to Ibra or at the very least, appreciate the path we chose. 📅 March 3 | Most anywhere books are sold

PMs don’t just ship features. They kill them. Shipping isn’t the job. Shipping the right product is. A great PM doesn’t fall in love with the roadmap. They fall in love with the problem and have the guts to say: This isn’t solving it. This adds complexity. This doesn’t matter. Every feature, setting, UI, element should fight to exist. At Nest, we had one rule: If you can’t explain why it matters, it doesn’t ship. You had to tell us the why. The reason a real person would care. That one rule killed dozens of features.

Aku x Barnes & Noble 📘 Aku: Journey to Ibra, our award-winning sci-fi novel, has been hand-selected as a 2026 priority title by Barnes & Noble!