creeptograin For a terse explanation, the last sentence of this post will do. The rest of it goes into how VMPX, among other projects like XenBlocks, is a symptom of Jack's misaligned priorities.
Google is infamous for working on many different projects that are either short-lived or never get released to the public:
https://killedbygoogle.com
Jack is doing something similar with VMPX and XenBlocks. Raz et al. are experimenting as well, but Jack in particular has built up a reputation for hyping up projects and then abandoning them. Take a look at these tweets of people voicing their concerns:
https://x.com/Lincoln771233/status/1712057237022065031
https://x.com/cryptomumz/status/1712111416142860652
And now, look at how much Jack is trying to get people excited about XenBlocks:
https://x.com/Xencryptoio/status/1707795931532349599
Jack will try to spin anything he's working on into first principles. I think he has his priorities backwards. IMO his team needs to be working on solving problems created by centralization and lack of education rather than creating experiments and trying to say somehow it fixes a problem that doesn't exist (which is 99.9% of crypto). Ordinals and POW have very little to do with Xen, they are simply things he takes personal interest in and tries to market them as such.
If I were him I would work on decentralizing frontends and educating on minting and claiming directly from the smart contract in anticipation of malicious attacks or some other breach of security.
For example I would love to see a wallet app that actually shows the contract address you're interacting with and the actual message you're signing. Coinbase wallet has "transaction previews" that don't even work with Polygon last time I checked, and I'm sure that can somehow be spoofed. Metamask just introduced snapshots which are third party extensions, and each of those extensions needs an audit - talk about a security nightmare. FFS there's a widely used function called NiceFunctionHerePlzClick943230089 (https://medium.com/@NftDoyler/what-is-nice-function-here-plz-click-and-was-my-metamask-hacked-36759a0a2ea9) everyone minting DBXENFTs has seen. There's a ton of room for innovation/improvement there, which would also benefit Xen because its ecosystem is so heavily reliant on user interaction with smart contracts.
Education on minting/claiming directly through smart contracts would require little maintenance as the contracts are immutable.
Focusing on these things would truly embody first principles. Security and education inherently democratize fairness and opportunity. In addition to increasing overall crypto adoption, it would bring more people to Xen through that ethos. Jack himself would personally benefit from this by cleaning up his reputation from shady details such as this:
https://x.com/s3py/status/1712176388617257301
Of course, security is not sexy until something horrible happens that could have been prevented by it, there are probably some intangible marketing benefits that Jack got from taking advantage of ordinals (and by extension benefits that Xen got), Jack will do whatever he wants to do at the end of the day, and he encourages the community to build projects themselves, but many of us are not sufficiently equipped, whether its with the experience, time, or capital.
VMPX and XenBlocks just seem like polished turds on the conveyor belt of junk that Jack is constantly cranking out. It's not the bearish sentiment/price so much as it is that he's not providing updates on past projects anymore, and from this it's reasonable to interpret that they aren't being worked on at all. However, I also fully concede to the likelihood that someone will pump the shit out of them during the bull market, along with many other assets that seem like polished turds. VMPX just isn't one of my picks.
