Menu #10: Mints, Meals, and Moats

Art Blocks recent mint
Steal Like An Artist
Web3 Dinner Club: 25th June (LDN)
The Return of Taste Markets
Novel Labs
Brand spice
Chefs Note

This is The Menu — the UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing.

What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

Some weeks are driven by narrative.
Others are driven by something harder to manufacture.

This one felt like the latter.

An Art Blocks mint cut through the noise — not just because of the return, but because of the taste behind it.

That’s the thread running through this week’s Menu:

less noise, more discernment
less performance, more substance
less chasing, more building

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

This month’s dinner is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

The generative art platform on Ethereum where artists publish algorithms.

Art Blocks describes themselves:

Artists publish algorithms instead of finished images, and collectors mint unique artworks that are created at the exact moment of purchase.

Each piece is generated on‑chain by the artist’s code, using rules and randomness to produce a never‑before‑seen output that becomes an NFT recording ownership and provenance on the blockchain.

The artist writes the system, the collector triggers it, and the artwork is born from that one‑time interaction between code and transaction.

Projects are organised into tiers like Curated and other series, which highlight technically and aesthetically ambitious work and have helped Art Blocks become one of the canonical venues for serious generative art on‑chain.

It launched on April 30, 2026 as part of the Art Blocks × OpenSea residency program (the artist was in residence in Marfa, Texas).

The 365-piece generative collection sold out in under 2 minutes.

Art Blocks has always been the place where generative art can still feel like a discovery, not just a drop.

That’s why Gift of Time by Manuel Larino landed so hard.

NFT Twitter lit up about it on May 2 with posts like “An Art Blocks mint just 20x’d in the year 2026. We might actually be back…” accompanied by collection screenshots showing the rapid floor rise. Some called it a nostalgic throwback to 2021 generative art pumps.

The pieces are abstract generative works that evoke diagrams, technical sketches, or the inner workings of a mechanical watch—systems in constant motion, blending circles, flowing lines, stripes, and layered patterns in earthy tones, soft blues, greens, and pastels.

The theme centers on time and transience:

“Time is the only material we can’t edit, pause, or duplicate.”

The project is explicitly a “thank you” to the artist’s family and the residency organisers for the gift of focused creative time.

You can view the live collection here:

This piece feels like a reminder of what Art Blocks was built for — art that’s coded, considered, and alive with structure, randomness, and meaning.

In a market that has spent most of the year chasing narratives, Gift of Time gave collectors something rarer: a mint that felt culturally legible, technically strong, and immediately desirable.

Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist is less a traditional book and more a compact creative pep talk. It argues that originality is not about inventing from nothing, but about borrowing with taste, remixing with honesty, and letting your influences become fuel rather than baggage.

It is a book about lineage.

Good work rarely appears from nowhere, and that creativity is usually less an act of pure invention than an act of attention, selection, and transformation.

Ten compact principles, delivered with enough conviction to feel useful rather than ornamental.

Kleon writes with the tone of someone passing along hard-won working advice, not performing genius, and the visual format — hand-lettered pages, diagrams, quotations, and blackout-style illustrations.

It is fast to read, but not flimsy. The design lowers the barrier to entry, while the voice makes the advice feel companionable instead of preachy.

The argument at the heart of the book is simple and still useful: you do not wait to become fully formed before you begin making things.

You study what you love, collect influences with taste, follow the thread of your curiosity, and build your own work through practice.

Kleon is especially good on the less glamorous parts of creativity — routine, side projects, sharing process, and the value of constraints.

In that sense, the book is as much about creative discipline as creative freedom.

It won’t teach you a technical craft, but it will give you a healthier relationship with creativity, influence, and starting before you feel ready.

This is a curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.

One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.

Just real conversation and the kind of signal that doesn’t show up in your LinkedIn feed.

The benefit is simple:

Not everyone gets a seat.

We keep it small precisely because anything that matters in Web3 — funding, partnerships, hires, and strategic advantage.

Starts with a handful of conversations you keep having with the same people.

Proudly Sponsored by Novel Labs.

For most of the past year, crypto has been a narrative market.

This week felt different.

Narratives are easy to trade.

They compress complexity into a story: AI, restaking, RWAs, memecoins.

You don’t need deep conviction, just timing.

The asset becomes a proxy for the idea, and price follows attention.

Taste markets work differently.

They’re slower to start, harder to fake, and much more selective.

You can’t outsource judgment to Twitter.

You have to decide what is actually good — technically, culturally, aesthetically — and act before consensus forms.

That’s what made the recent Art Blocks mint interesting.

Not just the multiple on the chart, but the shape of the demand.

A small, informed group recognised something early.

Quality, constraint, composition, intent and moved.

The broader market followed after.

That pattern is closer to how early crypto used to work:

In taste markets, edge comes from seeing clearly, not just moving quickly.

For founders, the implication is uncomfortable but useful.

You can ride narratives for attention.
But you build longevity through taste.

That shows up in product decisions, design, hiring, brand, and the kinds of people you choose to spend time with.

It’s not always legible in the moment. It compounds quietly, then all at once.

The same is true for capital.

In narrative markets, money chases momentum.
In taste markets, money concentrates around conviction.

The shift isn’t absolute — crypto rarely moves in clean phases — but moments like this are signals. Small ones, but directional.

The next cycle won’t just reward those who can tell the best story.

It will reward those who can recognise and create something worth paying attention to before everyone else agrees.

Taste, in other words, is back.

KPMG’s Crypto Assets Handbook (US GAAP, April 2026) is 150+ pages of the unglamorous truth:

If crypto is going to sit inside real companies, it has to survive accounting, audit and disclosure, not just market narratives.

The useful takeaway isn’t “how blockchain works” (though it covers that). It’s the framework it keeps coming back to: don’t look at the token’s label, look at the rights it gives you.

A token might be an intangible asset… or it might really be a financial asset, a prepaid service, or simply a digital wrapper for an underlying real-world asset. That one distinction drives everything from classification to reporting.

A few sections worth knowing even if you never touch GAAP:

Takeaway: crypto adoption isn’t being blocked by ideas, it’s being shaped by classification, enforceability, and auditability. The next wave of builders who win will speak this language fluently.

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Until next time