Broadly speaking, the market no longer cares about NFT art. I love the collection that I have put together over the last five years and I continue to buy pieces from time to time. But it is becoming harder as fewer artists mint their work and as more marketplaces shut down. For instance, last month, Foundation announced that it would be closing up shop after a failed sale of the company. This was one of the most well-known marketplaces from the 2021 NFT era.

The other problem with marketplaces shutting down is that now many NFTs are at risk of getting lost forever. But how is that possible given that blockchains are supposed to decentralized and immune to this sort of thing? Here's my non-technical explanation, which you may want to pay attention to if you own any NFTs.

The actual images or graphics that make up NFT art can be stored on blockchains in generally one of two ways: either on-chain or off-chain (which is how most NFTs are stored). On-chain means that the code required to render the image (usually vector graphics) is stored directly on the blockchain itself.

One of the most notable examples is the CyberBrokers collection created by Chicago artist Josie Bellini. In this instance, everything is stored on the Ethereum blockchain. It's more expensive to do it this way, but it means that as long as Ethereum exists, CyberBrokers exist. So, pretty permanent!

The other way that NFT art can be stored is off-chain. What this means is that the NFT you are buying is essentially a pointer to an image stored somewhere else on the internet. Owning the pointer is a way of saying, "I own that thing over there!" And since the pointer exists on a blockchain, you should have it forever. The question is whether "over there" still exists or if it's pointing to nothing. This is the problem to be concerned about if you own any NFTs.

"Over there" can take many forms. The image could be stored on a centralized server like what Instagram would use when you upload a photo or story. In this case, there's a high degree of risk that your art could disappear forever and you'd be left with a pointer that points to nothing. The link would be broken.

Decentralized storage is better than centralized storage, but it's important to understand the differences. Some decentralized storage networks, like Arweave, are more or less permanent. Arweave works by collecting a fee upfront with the promise that it will be enough to cover the cost of storing the data for at least 200 years. So again, pretty permanent.

But the most common place for NFTs to be stored is on something called the InterPlanetary File System (or IPFS). IPFS is unique in that it is a peer-to-peer network that uses content-based addressing, instead of location-based addressing. What this means is that you don't ask the network "where is this file stored?"; you ask the network, "who has this file?"

This is a crucial difference because it means that as long as your NFT art is stored somewhere in the world, it will remain accessible. However, the challenge is that there isn't a permanent funding model, so if a marketplace like Foundation was paying to store your art on IPFS and has now shut down, then "stored over there" will disappear and the pointer will point to nothing.

The good news is that there's an easy solution if your pieces are on IPFS. All you have to do is store or back up your NFT art somewhere and then there will always be an "over there" to point to! The term used is "pinning" your NFTs and I've been in the market for a service for a while. I considered a bunch of companies, and then last week I signed up with Piñata. It's free for 1GB of storage or $20/month for 1TB of storage.

If you've collected any NFTs that you care about, I would strongly encourage you to make sure that you've pinned the ones you can. It doesn't matter what you use to do it. It doesn't have to be Piñata. This is not a sponsored post and I'm in no way affiliated with the company. I just care about the crypto and NFT space, and I would hate for any of you to lose any of the work that you've collected.

If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember that back in 2021 we created the first-ever NFT collection tied to pre-construction condominiums (or at least we think we were the first to do it). It is called the Petra Cortright NFT Collection at One Delisle and you can read more about it here.

Cover photo by Peter Olexa on Unsplash

Sometime last year, Instagram changed its bottom menu bar to the following:

Bookended by the home button and the user profile button are now video reels, DMs, and the explore page. The create a new post button, which was formerly here in the center, was moved up to the top of the screen in a far less conspicuous place. These changes felt weird at first, but they were, of course, based on real user data. What people do on Instagram these days is watch reels and then share them with their friends. The era of posting beautiful square photos with nice filter edits died a long time ago.

But even today's world of video reels and TikTok videos is in massive flux. AI is flooding the system, and it's impossible to know what is "real" anymore. The name of the game with social media used to be authenticity. This is how individuals gained distribution control from institutions and large brands; they were more real and authentic. But today, we are in a world where AI-generated content can be entirely indistinguishable from "real" or captured content.

I have felt this change myself. As someone who has been a hobby photographer since undergrad some 20+ years ago, I have noticed myself grabbing my Fujifilm camera a lot less over the last year. Instead, I've just been using my phone and spending more time playing around with AI. And, of course, it's not just me. I see my architect and real estate friends using AI to test concepts, create presentation renderings, and more. So, where does all of this leave a platform like Instagram that was designed around individuals creating and sharing their own content?

A few days ago, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, published these twenty slides about how the company sees the world as we head into 2026. They're an interesting read because they mark a shift in messaging. Previously, the narrative was all about connecting the world and empowering creators. Now it's about labeling, mediating, and controlling this new world. In the words of Silicon Valley journalist and entrepreneur Om Malik, "deep down, Instagram is frightened."

But there is a path forward (excerpt also from Malik):

It starts by verifying who is behind an account, embedding provenance in media, and rewarding trust signals. Over time, Meta may tighten control and aim to be an identity broker for everyone. Instagrams want [sic] you to be prepared for this new era of tighter control over identity, authenticity, and content provenance.

One of the most important slides in Mosseri's post for me is this one here:

I've been arguing for years that crypto has an important role to play in a world filled with AI. When nobody knows what is "real" anymore, there's value in being able to say with finality that, hey, this thing over here is authentic and comes from this source. Social media (web2) showed us that people would rather tie something back to an individual instead of a large faceless brand. AI is disrupting this chain of provenance, but I think crypto will bring us back to it, somehow. Whether Instagram will be a part of it, of course, remains to be seen.

Cover photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Happy New Year! And welcome to another year of this daily blog. (In August of this year, we'll enter the 14th year of this daily practice.)

Exactly a year ago, I published a post talking about what might happen in 2025. It was last year's prediction post. Today, let's see how I did.

• Real estate development: I admitted that I had been overly optimistic in terms of how soon the market would reset (specifically Toronto). But I did still argue that 2025 would be an important turning point in terms of people capitulating and more legacy assets/deals getting reset. I think we did start to see this. We looked at a number of receivership sites and came across many instances where a landowner would take 40-50% of what they paid. The problem is that the market still hasn't fully reset and we're still in the midst of absorbing our current housing supply pipeline. So while it sounds nice to buy something for $0.40 on the dollar, what do you then do with it?

• Return-to-office: I said that we would see the average weekly occupancy index in downtown Toronto reach 90% by the end of 2025 (it was 73% when I wrote the post a year ago). As of November 2025, it was 82%. Not quite.

• Autonomous vehicles: I reversed my position (relative to the prior year) and said that autonomous vehicles are way further along than most people thought, at least at the time. And boy, was 2025 a great year for Waymo. It feels like they're now in scaling mode.

• EU carbon permits: A year ago, they were priced at €71.98 per tonne of carbon dioxide, compared to an all-time high of €105.73 in February of 2023. I guessed that they'd be between €90 and €100 by the end of 2025. Right now they're at €87.28.

• Crypto: I thought that 2025 would be a good year for crypto given the MAGA movement's support for it. For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. But if I look at the price of Ethereum, it's down 15.21% year-to-date. So not what I predicted. But I continued to dollar-cost average.

• Web3: I went on to predict that we would see a breakout web3 consumer app in 2025. I also mentioned that I was impressed by NFT marketplaces like Rodeo. Well, Rodeo has gone on to mostly die and I'm not sure it would be fair to say that there was anything that crossed over into the mainstream. I'm going to give myself a zero for this one. But if I had to pick something, I would say that Coinbase's "Base App" represents meaningful progress. Base continues to dominate the Ethereum Layer 2 market. It's fast and cheap.

I wish you all a healthy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2026.

Cover photo by Jamie Fenn on Unsplash