NFT Collection Art Gobbler’s Secondary Sale Hits $50 Million: What’s Behind the Hype?
Paradigm-supported NFT project Art Gobblers has recently become the center of attention within the NFT space. The project’s 2,000 free coin Gobblers sold for as much as 15 ETH minutes after launch. In total, the collection has already generated over $50 million in secondary sales. In this article, we explore the hype and history behind this NFT project.
What is the Art Gobblers NFT Project?
Launched on Monday, Art Gobblers is an Ethereum-based NFT project from “Rick & Morty” co-creator Justin Roiland and crypto investment firm Paradigm. Paradigm calls the project a “decentralized art factory owned by aliens.”
The project is called Art Gobblers because they gobble up art. More specifically, they eat the creator’s artwork and turn them into 1/1 NFTs using in-game resources. The artworks are then displayed in the stomach gallery of Gobblers forever.
However, what makes the project stand out is its attempt to create a self-sustaining NFT ecosystem, and Goo tokens are an important part of that. Goo tokens are produced by Art Gobblers, and are used to produce the blank pages needed to create art. Paradigm in detail:
“The supply of Goo grows faster every day, starting in the hundreds and eventually reaching billions and more. So the game cannot be balanced by giving goods fixed prices in Goo. Instead, a mechanism called VRGDA automatically adjusts prices over time to target a desired issue plan, and adjusts prices up when sales are ahead of schedule, and down when sales are delayed.”
As of now, Art Gobblers’ GOO token is trading at $224.61, down 72.4% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko. The coin has traded in the range between $189.81 and $814.33 in the last day, showing extreme volatility.
Initially, the project intends to issue Blank Page VRGDA at a rate of 69 per day. However, it will eventually slow down to a constant 10 per day “to ensure a high bar and focused attention from the community.”
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The controversy surrounding the Art Gobblers Allow List
Art Gobblers had a free coin that consisted of 2000 fully animated Gobblers. Given that players will be able to create 8,000 more Gobblers over the next 10 years, the number of free coins was quite significant. It also explains why some Gobblers sold out for as much as 15 ETH soon after their free coin.
However, the project’s unprecedented success has been overshadowed by controversy surrounding how the community discovered, promoted and financially benefited from the project. That is because many notable NFT social media influencers, content creators and famous personalities had successfully created one of the NFTs.
This led to speculation that some of these high-profile collectors may have been compensated with free and valuable NFTs in an attempt to create hype around the project. A Twitter user so:
“Last tweet (I hope) on Art Gobblers. This picture is flying all over NFT Twitter. I am not accusing anyone of impropriety. But many people (including me) think the NFT game is rigged. People don’t want to keep playing a game they think is rigged. Expect more to quit.”
While the controversy surrounding Art Gobblers has yet to be resolved, the project is certainly an innovative attempt to inject creativity and activity into the NFT space. However, it remains to be seen whether the project manages to maintain its popularity and importance in Web3 in the long term.
Meanwhile, according to data from major NFT marketplace OpenSea, Art Gobblers currently has a floor price of 8.8 ETH, or around $14,000, down nearly 50% over the past day.
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Do you think Art Gobblers will be able to live up to the hype? Let us know in the comments below.
About the author
Ruholamin Haqshanas is an accomplished crypto and financial journalist with over two years of experience writing in the field. He has a solid grasp of various segments of the FinTech space, including the decentralized iteration of financial systems (DeFi), and the emerging market for non-fungible tokens (NFT). He is an active user of digital assets for money transfers.
