“Some really funky and quirky aliens are strolling down the NFT town. These aliens will gobble up your art, squirting GOO in turn. Don’t worry, you can still see your precious art displayed in their bellies. Strange? But don’t be a stranger, grab one of these Art Gobblers to show off your strokes and skills!”
It seems like the buzz surrounding NFTs hasn’t waned at all and one of the NFT projects with promising art, utility, and community-focused approach is here! By now, you have already seen Art Gobblers infiltrate your timelines. If not, we’ll help you put the puzzle pieces together to let you know what’s been brewing in the NFT community.
Art Gobblers are nothing but a digital art experiment being carried out by hit show Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland and Web3 venture capitalist company Paradigm. Well, the involvement of such a well-known personality further hypes up the project, and the refreshing concept he added to NFTs gave it an edge in becoming a trending NFT project.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other reasons why these Gobblers are very appealing to NFT enthusiasts. Let’s introduce the “handsome” alien NFTs: “Art Gobblers” that are beaming down to the Earth’s surface straight from space.
What is Art Gobblers NFT Project?
Art Gobblers is a decentralized art factory that weird-looking aliens own. These aliens are called Gobblers who eat art made by artists, incentivizing them with GOO tokens. The gobbled-up art then displays in their bellies which are sort-of works like an art gallery.
Simply put, this decentralized art factory runs on art and its economy runs on GOO, an ERC20 Ethereum token that Art Gobblers squirt out of hoses on their backs. As artists make cool art, Gobblers gain cultural relevance, ultimately, increasing demand for Gobbler art among collectors.
To sum it all up, Art Gobblers is a self-sustaining decentralized ecosystem centered around creating and collecting the coolest art, adding value to the NFT art culture.
In fact, this hyped-up Art Gobblers project has already raked in $13M in just 2 hours after launch. This must have piqued your interest in knowing how Art Gobblers work. Let’s dive-in!
How do Art Gobblers work?
As the name “Art Gobblers” suggests, these creatures Gobble art. These aliens ‘Gobblers’ eat art that artists draw using the ‘draw tool’ and turn into 1/1 NFTs using in-game resources. Draw tool works on iPad, desktop, or Cintiq.
All the NFT artworks a Gobbler eats are stored on-chain and are displayed in its belly gallery forever. After digesting these artist-drawn NFT artworks, they produce Goo tokens which are used to produce the Blank Pages needed to make more art.
The uncanny nature of the Gobblers is that they love the smell of their own goo, so the more Goo they have in their Goo tanks, the faster they squirt out more new Goo.
The supply of Goo grows faster every day, starting at hundreds and reaching billions and beyond over time. So, in-game resources or items can’t be given fixed prices in Goo. Instead, a mechanism called VRGDA is responsible for balancing the game economy by automatically adjusting prices over time to target the desired issuance schedule.
For example, the VRGDA mechanism will move prices up when sales are ahead of schedule and down when sales are behind schedule.
Initially, it’s free to mint fully-animated Gobblers which are only 2,000 in total. Over the next 10 years, players can mint 8,000 more Gobblers using Goo tokens. Issuance is comparatively fast at first to kickstart growth but eventually slows down and ultimately drops to preserve exclusivity.
These systems maintain interesting gameplay, prompting players to decide when to trade Goo in exchange for Gobblers. This process changes the VRGDA price for everyone in the ecosystem.
What are pages in the Art Gobblers ecosystem?
The Art Gobblers’ journey starts with artists minting their own drawings as 1/1 NFTs with the help of in-game resources. This process is called Glamination. To draw their art, artists will need Blank pages if they want to extend their art gallery.
Hence, to glaminate your drawing onto a Page, you need a Blank Page NFT, which can be created using Goo. Once the artist uses Blank Page NFT to draw using the ‘draw tool’ and converts it into NFT, these NFTs go to the Art Gobblers Pages collection. The NFTs are ERC721 tokens belonging to the artist and can be sold or transferred by the artist at will.
The Art Gobblers ecosystem is based on producing these art Pages. The number of Pages allowed to create in a given period of time is limited by a VRGDA mechanism as explained earlier.
Any art glaminated onto a page will boost the cultural relevance of Art Gobblers which will grab the attention of the NFT community. With this, most accomplished collectors will also jump at the chance to see the potential in Art Gobbler’s NFT project.
Also, Blank Pages will not exist at the time of mint but can be created shortly after using Goo. The initial creation rate will be 69 pages per day to allow the community to experiment with memes, art styles, and more.
This issuance rate will slow down over the course of about 8 months until it hits a constant rate of 10 pages per day, which the protocol maintains forever.
No Pages accrue directly to the team whereas one in ten newly created pages will go to the vault to be distributed to artists in the community.
Role of Goo tokens in Art Gobblers’ economy
As per the GOO paper, Goo is an ERC20 Ethereum token produced by Art Gobblers NFTs. Goo is needed to make new Blank Pages. Art Gobblers ultimately determine what art can be created in the ecosystem which also makes them co-curators of a decentralized art gallery.
Another utility of Goo is that you can create new Gobblers which makes the gameplay all the more interesting. This way, players get to make a strategic decision to not fall behind other players in the game.
It would be a very bad strategy if you decide to hoard Goo tokens without owning any Gobbler NFTs. That’s because everybody else will be generating Goo with their Gobblers NFT, your share of the total Goo supply will rapidly reduce to nothing.
On the other hand, if you plan on owning many Gobblers but little Goo, your Goo production will be much less compared to other players.
What are Art Gobblers NFTs?
Art Gobblers NFTs are fully animated ERC721 tokens. These NFTs emit Goo and of course, gobble art. Let’s say, you own both an Art Gobbler NFT and some cool art on a Page NFT. If you feed that Page to your Gobbler, ownership of the Page transfers on-chain to the Art Gobblers contract.
The contract has a mapping indication that shows which piece of art belongs to which Gobbler. Also, that Page then becomes a permanent part of that Gobbler’s belly gallery which a user can view via the Art Gobblers app.
Remember, if you decide to transfer Gobbler, all of its Gobbled artworks go with it. Collectors can customize their Gobblers however they want. For instance, a Gobbler containing only works by Justin, a Gobbler containing only cute dog pictures, a Gobbler containing autographs, a Gobbler containing collaborative artwork from artists, and numerous other possibilities.
As mentioned in the section above, the initial 2,000 Gobblers are free to mint but those who are on the mintlist can only be able to mint. We’ll talk about mintlist later in this article. Note that, there are a total of 10,000 Art Gobblers NFTs, remaining 8,000 Gobblers players can buy using Goo tokens in the coming 10 years.
Well, among these 10,000, there are 10 legendary Gobblers. Before you scratch your head on how you can get them, let’s define legendary Gobblers.
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What are Legendary Gobblers?
The ten Legendary Gobblers are rare Gobblers that are represented as the supreme rulers of Gobbler civilization. These legendary Gobbler NFTs will be dropped over the next ten years. They will arrive at specific predestined times, giving the game a sense of structure with a hint of punctuated drama.
These Goo-boosting 1/1s Legendary Gobblers can only be obtained by burning huge numbers of regular Gobblers. The very first Legendary Gobbler is set at a price of 69 Gobblers and will become cheaper using the standard Dutch Auction mechanism until it is purchased.
Every successive Legendary Gobbler will start at a price in regular gobblers equal to twice what the previous Legendary Gobbler sold for.
To compensate for the sacrificed regular Gobblers, Legendary Gobblers squirt Goo at twice the rate of the combined Gobblers burned to summon them.
Moreover, a new Legendary Gobbler appears each time an extra 10% of the total number of Gobblers is issued via VRGDA. Each auction for Legendary Gobblers is scheduled to end by the time the next one appears or when all Gobblers are issued in the case of the final Legendary one.
How to mint Art Gobblers?
Till now, we have established that Art Gobblers begin at a supply of 2,000, issued as a free mint. But the people on the mintlist were only allowed to mint these ‘free to mint’ Art Gobblers. Of these, 300 Gobblers go to the core team and the remaining 1,700 will go to the community, collaborators, artists, builders, contest winners, builders, and others.
Mintlist was composed mainly of artists, collectors, and builders who participated in 3 contests –one for artists, one for collectors, and one for builders.
The contest required artists to draw using the ’draw tool’ illustrating a concept from the project’s Greenpaper. Collectors were asked to share their reflections on what Art Gobblers mean for the crypto art word – aesthetically, socially, culturally and economically. The builders were also asked to create anything consisting of Gobblers, Goo, protocols, or novel games that integrate Gobbler assets.
Winners got a spot in the mintlist based on the coolest stuff they made for the Art Gobblers ecosystem. Mintlist also included the holder of an NFT from one of Justin Roiland’s previous collections and other small contests hosted to encourage collaboration.
As of now, the mintlist is already full and you can only wait for the next minting process or grab one from the secondary market.
Over the next ten years, the remaining 8,000 Gobblers will be minted. The protocol used will issue around 200 Gobblers per month, but the supply will slow down over time. This way, the community can grow quickly while also avoiding over-inflation in the long term.
The distribution is such that one in ten newly minted Gobblers will accrue to the team. An additional one in ten will go to a vault to be distributed among the community.
Art Gobblers Future Aspects
There is no roadmap for Art Gobblers as of now. Neither Justin Roiland nor Paradigm nor the Art Gobblers team plan to build anything new after this ongoing free mint. Also, Art Gobblers doesn’t have any metaverse plan yet.
It’s based on an experimental alien technology that will be unleashed as more people join the ecosystem. The mechanism making up the Art Gobblers experiment is focused on empowering the artist and creating a collectors-driven community.
As artists keep on making cool art, the cultural relevance of Art Gobblers will grow and Gobbler art will be in higher demand from collectors. Seeing the higher collector demand, artists will produce ‘cooler’ art and that’s how it will create a self-sufficient ecosystem.
Head on to OpenSea or Blur to grab one of these Goo-loving aliens, Gobble on!
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