A huge thank you to The Nightman for contributing his thoughts and opinions.

Disclaimer: this is not financial advice. However, we hope that this can be useful to help artists protect their earnings.

General Crypto History:

New, volatile asset class, with lots of unknowns but also upside potential

I'm of the opinion no other coin does what bitcoin does better than bitcoin.
- But bitcoin doesn't natively have smart contracts, I think there's sidechains and such with smart contract capabilities but most of the developer work (which is followed by user activity) on smart contracts initially occurred on ETH.

Smart contracts are what enables/defines Web3.
So ETH is very exciting, and while it will never be bitcoin, it may be something totally different that may provide equal if not more value to society.
- Then over the past few years we've seen other smart contract platforms like tezos, avax, binancechain, and solana offer slightly different competitive advantages against ETH for their blockchains and smart contracts.

Unlikely without a market-wide gov't crackdown, BTC or ETH aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Tezos surprisingly has been around awhile, and had a cool grass-roots artist movement that we siphoned some talent from (onto Solana), but tezos foundation had its issues and scandals as well towards its beginning but its leadership seems very smart and capable.
BNB's fate obviously in the hands of Binance which means its solidified but risky, its been around for a while, but binance as an exchange is always under pressure from regulators.

Avax and Sol are both very new. Both chains have heavy investment from prominent VC firms (good or bad) so good chance neither chain disappears overnight.
And prices usually rebound during these cyclical bear markets, but builders need to keep building and creators need to keep creating.
- Bull markets represent the hype of these cryptos and potential with web 3, people get a taste of the future and values (relatively) get skewed upwards.
- Similarly in bear markets, the lack of participants and decreased liquidity as a snowballing effect and crypto is often devalued (relatively) in a bear market.
  - I keep saying “relatively” since it is a cycle, there's a lot of mean reversion from both directions in Crypto’s general trend upwards.

Someone who doesn't rely on NFT sales for their livelihood could use a more HODL-friendly strategy, and keep their SOL sales profits in fully crypto but maybe diversify between bitcoin and maybe eth in addition to SOL.
Where-as someone who is trying to sell NFTs for a living, might need to more routinely sell their SOL sales into fiat (usd or stablecoin or eur).
- Given the history so far of crypto, even for full-time artists, in my opinion, it's important beyond diversifying SOL sales into fiat, to also diversify into btc and maybe eth.

Personally believe in the future in crypto but also expect volatile swings of liquidity/price/attention.