I’ll admit it. I check the ANIME price prob 100x per day. Maybe more. It’s on my lock screen, my home screen, my desktop. Prob have 15 duplicated tabs open on it at any given time. Quite literally every time I look at ANY of my screens, I see the ticker. And yeah, I still hold 100% of my community allocation from all the NFTs I personally bought before joining the team. So the price action is not lost on me. Far from it. As a contributor to ANIME, an OG Azuki collector, and an employee at Azuki, I want nothing more than to see its success. As we watch the broader space unfold (melt down?) these past few weeks, its not hard to feel the pressure of down bad. We lose faith in our pocket of web3 as metas rotate, and then in web3 entirely through scandal after scandal. And so naturally, in the timeless tradition, out come the “wen wen WEN” demands. So here are some unsolicited thoughts. Having supported the TGE as a contributor, I can safely say that running a TGE is no joke, much less one launching on nearly every major exchange. The churn and thrash of everything that goes into a TGE, combined with a thousand competing inputs and demands, magnified by rapidly shifting market metas, is truly resource draining. From the outside, a token launch can appear straightforward and simple (just pick a date and hit launch, right? Thats how it works on pumpfun!!!!). But on the other side, its truly a company churning exercise that can eat up weeks and/or months. It stretches your resources, commands all your attention, and tests your perseverance. Now, this isn’t meant to be a sob story. Instead, its to highlight what becomes possible when a company DOESN’T need to focus explicitly on a TGE. As a PM, your job is prioritization, and under TGE circumstances, quite literally EVERYTHING not strictly for TGE is not a priority. And lifting that burden is HUGE. For Azuki, we’ve long been working on what we think will become some of the most meaningful and impactful products/platforms in Anime (and web3 generally). If what we are doing were fast or simple, it would have been done already. If what we are doing were easy, it wouldn’t be valuable. We haven’t been standing still. This year, I expect us to only accelerate our delivery as true products become our 100% focus again. The products are ambitious. They are aggressive. They are exciting. They are fun. They are real. They will push crypto forward. And they are valuable. You may not see the picture clearly yet (and I don't blame you), but over time it will become abundantly clear.