Bálint Popovits

Heads up We're adding trends into the @zora app and .co website soon. It will be on base and is nicely integrated with the existing creator experience. Some notes 1. I expect this to be met with some combination of disinterest and then some further hate. Fair enough. 2. We will be doing 1bps fees for Trends for the first month. This is the lowest we could safely take them. This is for trader UX, to experiment with the logical extreme of the $zora pairing model, and also like why not it'll be interesting to see. 3. You will be able to pair any of your new posts with any trend. These posts will show in a different section of your profile to delineate between them. The UX is very fun and more simple than it sounds, it’s like a tradable hashtag or TikTok sound. 4. The zorb will return. Expect to see it show back up on social channels. It never changed on the app store so that will remain. 5. Our app usage held up better than expected despite the huge amount of self-inflicted turbulence to start off the year. Moving forward I'm just going to remain centered on our own metrics and what we see vs. overrotating on commentary and other dashboards. 6. If I could go back in time I'd probably just take some time off at the beginning of the year and stay the course: we originally planned to launch Trends on Base. Instead I simply powered ahead after an already crazy year (5 years really), friends and partners shutting down, moving on and publicly pivoting across the space, and I overreacted to the market and commentary across the timeline. This was all somewhat exacerbated by the fun and speed of being able to ship with AI. 7. The Solana team is awesome, the network tech is strong and opinionated and the different tools and teams in the ecosystem are fun and high quality to work with. I hope for us to show up again there in the future in a way that plays more to our strengths and a complimentary way to our existing markets vs. all or nothing. 8. One pivot too far: we've survived and grown by making structural changes to the core experience (e.g. 1/1s to editions, editions to coins) that improve the core experience. This one was an incorrect pattern match that in hindsight I could have known due to the fact that a) it was in a different app and b) I wanted to change the brand. 9. I put our users, community and team through an unnecessary amount of turbulence through the start of the year—I'm sorry about that. I can't guarantee I won't make incorrect bets again in the future but I definitely have some lessons to minimize the pain to the extent possible. One of those lessons is to be more proactive in comms, e.g. like this post you're reading right now. 10. We simply keep building.

Being a woman in the art industry is still, statistically, far from equal. → On March 8th, here’s @_nataliesosa, part of the Fellowship team, sharing some thoughts on what it feels like to be a woman in this industry today. Thank God I have the opportunity to talk about this topic on this platform. But even having to say “thank you” for that feels unfair. this shouldn’t be unusual. I would honestly love to live in a world where this conversation wasn’t necessary. Still, what I’m going to say is a harsh truth. So let’s start with the numbers: → Around 87% of artists in major U.S. museum collections are men, while only 13% are women. Even though about 51% of artists are women, only about 1 in 10 artworks acquired by museums are by women. (I’ll leave the links to these studies below.) These are not small differences; they are patterns. When museums acquire less work by women, they have less to exhibit. When they exhibit less, the market receives fewer signals to invest. Inequality becomes self-reinforcing. -.- And if you’re not mad enough yet: → The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) frames the disparity in a way that makes the scale hard to ignore: since 2008, the total auction sales of Pablo Picasso alone have roughly matched the total auction sales of all women artists combined across every genre. On the other hand, being presented as a “woman artist” can carry a quiet penalty. The art world sometimes treats women’s success as a separate category, important, but still separate. Women-only shows can open doors, but they are often framed as exceptions to the “main” conversation rather than part of it. In fact, part of my work at Fellowship is trying to avoid communicating about artists in that way. ☝️ Still, I want to believe the industry is evolving. One of the most encouraging signs is where attention is shifting: → Artsy reports that gender parity looks dramatically better among younger generations in auction data. Among “ultra-contemporary” artists (born in or after 1975), women accounted for 44% of auction sales. → The same report also shows shifts in online demand: for Gen Z artists (born in or after 1997), works by women accounted for 51% of inquiries on Artsy in 2023. 🥹 Meanwhile, inequality remains real in many parts of the ecosystem. The NMWA reports that artworks by women account for about 39% of gallery sales, which is closer to parity than auctions but still not equal, but yeah it's an advance. Ultimately, gender inequality in the art world persists because it is structural. Collections, exhibitions, criticism, and capital reinforce one another. But that also means change can be structural. Museums can set acquisition targets and publish their progress. Galleries can improve representation without treating women as a niche. Critics and curators can stop framing women’s work as exceptions. And for women artists, showing our work as women should never be an obligation or a marketing category forced onto us. It can be a choice, a way of claiming context, lineage, and power, while we continue pushing toward a future where the word “artist” includes women by default, not by exception. 💜 ↓ Shoutout to some of artists working in Fellowship. 💜 @pointline_ 💜 Sougwen Chung 💜 @ix_shells 💜 @hollyherndon