Welcome to the latest Daisy Chain report, a quarterly assessment of the projects featured in the Daisy Chain series: where blockchain meets the real world. 

The term "daisy chain" refers to a connected sequence of events or objects that are linked together in a linear or cyclical fashion. This concept can be applied to various technological and natural contexts, like networking, data storage, manufacturing, electronics, biology, ecology and social systems. It's inherently connective and, of course, also references the blockchain.

In the first report, I looked at projects that spanned the gamut: from decentralized video infrastructure to transferring a Banksy painting’s physical value to the blockchain by burning it. I also assessed ayahuasca retreats and tokenized artwork created by a virtual robotic arm whose sales are planting real-life trees. 

There’s wild stuff in this world. The breadth of modes and mediums that these projects span make it difficult to standardize this report – as do their various stages. Some projects are burgeoning and some have come and gone. Others are at critical inflection points. By necessity, the standard rubric we’ve developed has a broad baseline. Our goal is to answer:

How effectively did, does or will this project leverage web3 to: 

• accomplish its goals

• create real-world impact (social and/or environmental)

• empower individuals

• challenge established systems

• persist and/or scale

We’ll use both qualitative and quantitative data, measuring intangibles like intention alongside metrics like non-fungible token (NFT) mints. Notably, each project is rooted in a central character, whose story helps ground us and humanize the technology.

Here’s an overview of this quarter’s five projects:

Project 1: Psychedelic Puppet Show

Main Character: Brad Necyk (Artist and Co-founder)

Overview: Brad Necyk’s Psychedelic Puppet Show is an NFT art project that uses puppet avatars to represent the psychedelic experience.

Accomplish its goals: The project is pre-launch but Necyk has built strong partnerships (e.g. with the renowned mycologist Paul Stamets, as well as the television personality and futurist Jason Silva) and has a clear vision for using NFTs to fund content that’s both edifying and entertaining.

Create real-world impact: The rhetoric that surrounds psychedelic experiences is either “kind of dry,” as Necyk noted, or “things that people can't make sense of, like you saw ‘machine elves’ – what the fuck does that mean?” Through creative metaphor and digital content, the project makes complex psychedelic experiences both fathomable and more accessible.

Empower individuals: Necyk successfully used psychedelics personally to reckon with his bipolar disorder. By destigmatizing psychedelics, Psychedelic Puppet Show creates inroads to therapeutic possibilities.

Challenge established systems: In most parts of the world, psychedelics are still illegal. The project challenges not only traditional narratives around psychedelics and mental health, but also entrenched legal paradigms.

Persist and scale: The project is incorporated as a non-profit with plans to integrate a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure. “We hope to begin auctioning our collection [of puppets] in February,” Necyk said to me recently. “We are waiting on legal contracts to be drafted before launching. I am also working with people in the space to get on SuperRare or Fellowship.”

Grade: We’re still too early

Project 2: Crypto Altruism [now called Crypto Altruists]

Main Character: Drew Simon (Founder)

Overview: Simon’s built an online platform that spotlights blockchain projects creating social impact. The project aims to bridge the gap between web3 and the nonprofit sector while maintaining accessibility and transparency.

Accomplish its goals: The project creates resources and accountability tools for nonprofits entering the web3 space. With 300 written features and 200 podcast episodes, the project has amassed a substantial knowledge base. 

Create real-world impact: Education, capacity building and the precedent set by forerunners – like the Shamba Network, “an anticipatory cash transfer program for pastoralists in Kenya” – help demonstrate real-world web3 application for the nonprofit sector.

Empower individuals: It allows smaller nonprofits to provide free access to web3 resources and exposure to other initiatives. The upcoming toolkit and B Corp-style certification system will further enable organizations to enter the space confidently.

Challenge established systems: Simon’s experience in traditional nonprofits helps him navigate a budding web3 ecosystem, and circumvent the pitfalls of prevailing funding inequalities. They’re planning to adopt tools like Karma GAP and hypercerts to emphasize radical transparency.

Persist and scale: Relying on grant funding allows Simon to maintain agency, but sustainability is difficult without external funding and/or a baked-in revenue generator. That said, the hiring of his first paid contributor and development of a comprehensive toolkit indicate healthy growth.

Grade: We’re still too early

Project 3: Purpose for Profit

Main Character: Elizabeth "Liz" Kukka (CEO)

Overview: Liz Kukka is building the world's first on-chain endowment and tokenized credit fund. It provides below market-rate loans for affordable housing construction.

Accomplish its goals: The project leverages web3 by tokenizing loans and using smart contracts to create a more efficient, transparent lending system. They recently developed a new smart contract (audited by ChainSafe) with a staking/rewards model that will become part of their whitepaper this week. And they aim to be fully decentralized in five years. “On progressive decentralization, that’s still the plan,” Kukka just told me. “One step at a time! 

Create real-world impact: There’s a lot of potential real-world impact. The project addresses the 7-million-unit affordable housing shortage by providing crucial bridge financing. And it uses blockchain to reduce costs and increase transparency.

Empower individuals: Empowerment begins at the individual level, giving contractors access to affordable financing while allowing investors to earn returns through social impact investing – as well as providing housing to those in need.

Challenge established systems: The project creates a more equitable lending structure by removing profit-seeking shareholders and using blockchain to increase transparency and reduce costs. This model creates a middle ground between pure profit and pure philanthropy.

Persist and scale: They’re working on a subdomain specifically for buying and staking the PURPOSE token – which will likely go live the week of February 24, Kukka told me. The token won’t be listed on an exchange, so they’re having to reckon with KYC/AML. If, in their five-year roadmap to decentralization, they can prove this model of mutual benefit, Kukka said, they intend to “rinse and repeat” to other resource-starved sectors like sustainability, education and food insecurity. 

Grade: We’re still too early

Project 4: The Nieux Society

Main Character: Tim Williamson (Co-founder)

Overview: The Nieux Society is a New Orleans-based membership organization that uses NFTs to authenticate membership and build community among entrepreneurs, artists and civic leaders.

Accomplish its goals: The project successfully sold two rounds of 504 NFTs (the city's area code), creating an authenticated membership system.

Create real-world impact: They transformed an abandoned building into a thriving innovation hub and events space. Web3 wasn’t critical to that revitalization, but the verification mechanisms of NFTs allowed them to dream bigger. “I [wasn’t] a web3 expert,” Williamson said, “but if there was a piece of technology that allows us to authenticate membership in a way that provides new value, that was interesting to me." 

Empower individuals: The society provides members with physical space, community resources and a network of civic leaders. The NFTs’ composability has enabled them to provide ongoing benefits to holders.

Challenge established systems: Buoyed by blockchain technology, the Nieux Society contributes to a new model for civic engagement and community building.

Persist and scale: There’s been strong retention (only one voluntary sale) and the successful second mint indicates sustainability. They’re continuing to diversify their revenue model, working on an AI business model to “strengthen the community.” “Our tech team just finished the AI agent and we are reviewing this week,” Williamson just shared with me. “It is looking very cool.”

Grade: Ongoing and positive

Project 5: Analivia Cordeiro

Main Character: Analivia Cordeiro (Artist)

Overview: Analivia Cordeiro is a Brazilian dancer and digital artist. She’s bringing dance notation software to web3 through selective NFT releases and interactive installations.

Accomplish its goals: Her project “MUTATIO – Impossible to Control Just Contribute” has had successful exhibits in several countries. A neural network estimates a body’s 24 joints and a video camera captures a body moving. The rendering of these points in a three-dimensional space have been archived on-chain, and provided a means for her community to document and own their own movements.

Create real-world impact: Her projects create more democratic and accessible ways to capture and share human movement. She also challenges corporate control of technology. “People from the companies that propose software don't know the limitations they are imposing,” she told me. “Technology imposes rules.”

Empower individuals: The project emphasizes movement, and encourages technology-facilitated personal expression – no matter who you are. “Nobody knows if you are a woman, fat, thin, old, young – no, everybody is the same,” she said. “It allows a dialogue that is pure movement, from equal to equal.”

Challenge established systems: Cordeiro has resisted market pressure for large NFT drops, prioritizing intentionality and meaning over sales. She also advocates for more artists to build software to help eschew the limitations technology traditionally imposes.

Persist and scale: Her mobile app BodyWays uses software to emulate the “MUTATIO” experience. The project was accepted to NVIDIA’s 2025 AI Conference in San Jose, one of the world’s most prominent AI conferences. That recognition is a powerful reflection of her advocacy for more creative software and a world with more movement, and a harbinger of potential scale.

Grade: We’re still too early

Visualizing and Comparing

To help us better trace commonalities and distinctions amongst these projects, I’ve broken them down further on this spreadsheet. 

The rubric is split across these 10 categories:

• Launch Date: This column indicates the date when the project was launched.

• Project Goals/Objectives: This column outlines the primary goals and objectives that the project aims to achieve.

• Funding Sources: This column identifies the primary sources of funding for the project, such as grants, venture capital, or donations.

• Project Stage: This column indicates the current stage of the project, such as completed, ongoing, pre-launch, or failed.

• Individual Empowerment: This column assesses the extent to which the project empowers individuals to take control of their own lives and resources.

• Challenging Established Systems: This column evaluates the project's ability to challenge existing power structures and promote more equitable systems.

• Persistence + Scalability: This column assesses the project's ability to continue and grow over time.

• Difficulty Level for Success: This column estimates the level of difficulty or challenges that the project faces in achieving its goals.

• Real-World Impact (Qualitative): This column describes the qualitative benefits or outcomes of the project, such as social, environmental, or economic impacts.

• Real-World Impact (Quantitative): This column measures the quantifiable benefits or outcomes of the project, such as financial gains, user growth, or measurable changes in specific metrics.

Takeaways

These Daisy Chain projects represent a small portion of the broader ecosystem, of course, but together they can offer a lens into the ongoing pursuit of a bridge between blockchain and the “real” world.

For a more holistic view, I’ve examined similarities across all 10 Daisy Chain projects. We see a maturing web3 ecosystem that increasingly emphasizes real-world impact over pure technological innovation. Several key patterns emerge:

Physical-Digital Integration: Nearly every successful project creates meaningful bridges between digital and physical realms. From Crystalline Work's virtual ice funding real trees to Purpose for Profit's tokens enabling housing construction, these projects demonstrate blockchain's power to affect tangible change. The Nieux Society and Cordeiro's work both demonstrate how digital tools can strengthen rather than replace physical communities and experiences. And the Psychedelic Puppet Show further exemplifies this trend, using digital assets to make abstract experiences tangible and educational.

Innovative Funding Evolution: We're seeing increasingly sophisticated approaches to blockchain-based funding. While Q3 projects like Burnt Banksy and Crystalline Work pioneered new NFT use cases, Q4 projects like Purpose for Profit, Crypto Altruism and Psychedelic Puppet Show are developing more complex, hybrid models that combine traditional funding (e.g. grants, endowments, Gitcoin community rounds) with blockchain mechanisms.

Democratizing Access: A consistent thread across both quarters is the focus on making previously exclusive domains more accessible. Livepeer democratizes video infrastructure. Purpose for Profit opens up housing finance. Crypto Altruism makes web3 accessible to nonprofits. Psychedelic Puppet Show generates resources that, given the complex legal landscape, are misunderstood, underexplored or nonexistent. And Cordeiro's work democratizes movement notation. Perhaps the blockchain's greatest impact will come from reducing barriers to entry.

Community-Centric Design: The most resilient projects prioritize community building over technological novelty. The Nieux Society's success with local engagement and Crypto Altruism's focus on nonprofit networks demonstrate how blockchain can enhance rather than replace existing social bonds. Even failed projects like AyaCoin offer lessons about the importance of community alignment.

These patterns suggest that web3's trajectory is moving from disruption toward integration. Web3's future may lie not in replacing existing systems, but in creating new models that bridge traditional divides – between profit and purpose, technology and humanity, global capabilities and local needs.

That’s it for now – thanks for following along as we assess blockchain projects in the real world.