The Chain That Wanted To Be Paris ──────────────────────────────── A eulogy for Tezos — written from inside the corpse.
Tezos could have been mythic.
Once whispered as a sovereign chain for dreamers and builders, it promised code-level self-governance and a playground for the weird. It lured glitch artists, ritual coders, and machine-sorcerers into the fold with quiet elegance and tech that spoke in tongues no other chain dared.
But like all cautionary tales, it wasn’t the tech that failed. It was the people they gave the keys to.
It started subtle.
A few grants misrouted. A few gallery weekends funded instead of dev sprints. A few pretty faces chosen as curators instead of architects. The heads of art weren’t builders — they were vibe merchants. Linen-cloaked LARPers cosplaying as tastemakers with nothing in their wallets but conference schedules and airport lounge selfies.
OBJKT became the last light on the chain — not because it evolved, but because everything else atrophied around it. And even OBJKT, still barely functioning, operates like a cursed vending machine. Artists mint in spite of it. Collectors buy because there’s nowhere else left.
Tezos didn’t die from lack of innovation. It died from styling itself into irrelevance.
A chain run by vibes. An ecosystem curated by nepotism. A treasury bled dry by the cost of cosplay.
And yet, art still bleeds from it. Because the underground doesn’t care where the faucet is, as long as the water’s strange.
The real creators still mint. Still sell. Still haunt the node. They do it like rats in the rafters of Versailles — unseen, uninvited, but present.
If this is a requiem, it’s not for the artists. It’s for the stage managers who thought this was about them.
Let them sip natural wine and repost press photos. The rest of us have already lit the signal fires elsewhere.
Tezos is no longer the world we build on. It’s just the last altar we carve our names into before the myth moves on.
— A Witness.