Every so often in the NFT space, we begin to hear a collection’s name mentioned more frequently as it approaches its mint date. Recently, one project that keeps on popping up is Art Gobblers.
Art Gobblers is set to mint on October 31st 2022, on Halloween, or “Gobblerween” as the team calls it. With its mint fast approaching, it’s the perfect time to learn about what Art Gobblers are, and its complex economics.
What Is Art Gobblers?
Before we dive right into what Art Gobblers is, let’s take a look at the creators. The team behind these aliens is Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and crypto investment firm Paradigm. Is this a powerhouse team? I certainly think so.
Art Gobblers is a new kind of NFT collection. Essentially, it’s a decentralized art factory owned by aliens. As artists make cool art, Gobblers gain cultural relevance, making collectors want the art more, incentivizing artists to make cooler art.
It’s also an on-chain game. Art Gobblers are called Art Gobblers because they gobble art. In particular, they eat art that artists draw using their draw tool and turn into 1/1 NFTs using in-game resources. All the artworks a Gobbler eats belong to it on-chain and are displayed in its belly gallery forever.
Art Gobblers themselves are fully animated ERC721 NFTs. The collection is going to consist of 2,000 tokens from mint, and 300 of them are going to be reserved for the team.
The supply will consist of 10 legendary 1/1s, representing the supreme rulers of “Gobbler civilization.” Over time, the collection will expand by an additional 8,000 Gobblers over a period of 10 years at an initial rate of around 200 Gobblers per month. This will inflate the total supply of the collection to 10,000.
What is $GOO?
Each Art Gobbler produces $GOO (gradual ownership optimization), an ERC–20 token that is then used to produce the blank pages needed to make the art. Blank pages are ERC721 NFTs that belong to the artist, and producing these pages for art is the main point of the ecosystem. “The supply of $GOO grows faster every day, starting at hundreds and eventually reaching billions and beyond. So, the game can’t be balanced by giving items fixed prices in $GOO.”
What this means is, since the supply of $GOO is set to expand indefinitely, Gobbler NFTs and blank pages are not sold at fixed prices. Instead, a system called VRDGA (variable rate GDAs) automatically adjusts prices over time. If the demand is higher than expected, the price rises. If the demand is lower than expected, then the price falls. At the beginning, 69 page NFTs will be created each day, but issuance is set to lower to 10 NFTs a day over the course of 8 months.
While the actual mechanics of the NFT collection are very complex and involve tokenomics which are not easy to follow, the concept is actually relatively simple. The entire collection will function as transferable on-chain art galleries.
As mentioned previously, Art Gobblers can eat and digest a piece of art and add it to their belly gallery. If the Gobbler is sold, then all of the art it has collected in its belly is sold along with it. This mechanism allows the holders to curate their Gobblers’ bellies as they please. It is totally up to the owner whether their Gobbler collects anime, dog pictures, or even self-portraits.
What In Store For Gobblers Future?
If you’ve come here looking for a roadmap, well, there isn’t one. Art Gobblers will be launched as a finished product, designed to bootstrap a self-sustaining ecosystem. Neither Justin, nor Paradigm, nor the Art Gobblers team plan to build anything net new after the upcoming free mint.
Art Gobblers is not ‘stage one’ of the Gobblers metaverse. It is a whole and complete piece of alien technology that we will be unleashing upon an unsuspecting populace. What it does next, and how the inhabitants of Earth choose to aid it in its mission, is anyone’s guess.
Art Gobblers is minting in just a few days, so be sure to pencil the launch into your calendar. If you’re still unsure of what this experimental piece of alien technology is, then please see this paper by Paradigm.
