Overview
Thesis and Dysmorphia channel is a video archive that lets you hear ecosystem founders and organizers describe their own projects in their own words. The interviews come from a two-person research duo, so the questions lean toward motivation and community rather than product demos. The series ran to a prologue plus seven episodes and stopped there.
The channel belonged to Thesis and Dysmorphia, a research project that spent a year surveying how people in the Cardano community felt about NFTs, the teams behind them, and the ecosystem around them. Video was one outlet for that work, alongside written reports and a survey tool the pair built themselves. The two researchers went by the names Thesis and Dysmo and stayed anonymous while the study was running, so that people answering their surveys would not be swayed by who was asking1.
Key Features
- An eight-part interview series with named guests. Thesis On Cardano opens with a prologue and runs through seven episodes, each a recorded conversation with a guest working in the Cardano ecosystem at the time2.
- Guests who ran ecosystem projects. Episodes feature independent builders, a contributor from AdaLink, and a member of a working group at Intersect, the member-based organization that helps coordinate Cardano's governance2.
- A demo of the team's own survey tool. The earliest video walks through Fork It, the market research platform the duo built to collect responses from people across the community2.
- Research framing rather than promotion. The videos sit alongside a published lab paper that lays out a year-long study of the Cardano NFT space, built on repeat member surveys, social channel tracking, and market analysis3.
- A public funding trail. The pair filed eight proposals to Project Catalyst, Cardano's community grant fund, covering a research platform, an academic journal concept, and a local meetup. None of them were funded4.
What to Expect
The videos are plain recorded conversations rather than produced shows: two people on a call, light editing, roughly the length of a podcast episode. Watch a few and you get a snapshot of what a set of smaller Cardano projects were building, and what their teams were worried about, during the window the interviews cover.
The channel is dormant. Nothing has been posted since the closing episode, and the project's own website no longer resolves. What survives in public is this video archive, the lab paper, a link hub, a Discord server, and an X account. Both research reports were distributed as collectible tokens through jpg.store, a Cardano NFT marketplace that has since closed, though the Cardano Pulse report can still be minted through the NMKR pages the link hub points to.
For the written side of the project, the team's lab paper is published online and sets out the study's phases and its purpose, closing in September 2023 with a note that nothing further was planned at that stage3. The interview series came after that note, and nothing has followed it. That makes Thesis and Dysmorphia YouTube useful as a record of a completed piece of community research and of the people who took part in it, rather than as a place to look for new material.
