NFT Distribution paradigms, Complete on-chain games and a potentially new meta.

Art gobblers is probably one of the most exciting projects coming out this quarter of the year. Several different components have slowly led up to it, so just a “short” article looking at various aspects of this project and probably another NFT blue-chip is you are to believe the echo chambers that I am a part of.

One of the core problems in crypto, whether it be the tokenomics of a project or even in the NFT space, is the question,” what is a fair distribution of a supply?” Put in other ways, how do you distribute things in the right way (and what is “right”)? While when it comes to airdropping a supply of tokens, there is no correct answer, and a search for a good answer continues, you would think that this might be somewhat different in the case of NFTs. Regardless of low supply dynamics, if there’s something common in the general crypto landscape is an eventual accretion of supply in the hands of a few whales or super-collectors. Most people seem to agree that supply should be in the hands of more people than fewer, at least when the distribution starts.

In the case of token supplies, a lot of this can be traced back to Sybil practices in the case of airdropped supplies or simple whale acquisition during distribution phases, i.e. when the coin dumps a lot and the whale just buys a considerable part of the supply. But more common than not, even the genesis distribution of most token supplies looks much more skewed than you would want them to be, irrespective of various rules/anti-Sybil practices that might be in place. Of course, some of this can be attributed to the fact that sometimes core “contributors” or early believers (other than the team itself) of a project can be chosen to be airdropped a more significant piece of the pie because they’ve been with the team since the start and this is just one way of thanking everything they’ve done.

Now that my short digression ends, how does any of this compare to NFTs, and what does this have to do with art gobblers? NFTs have had a variety of ways of genesis distribution, they originally started with crypto punks which was a free mint back in 2017/18 (I think), and in this past cycle, it started with hashmasks choosing the bonding curve, which went on for quite some time, then started free mints again which were quite possibly some of the worst ways of distributing assets because it devolved to on-chain gas wars noticeable if you follow the ETH gas fees in any year the spikes mostly corresponding to NFT mints rather than crashes, these free mints somewhat also get exploited by bots but in the free wild forest that we describe our chain environment as anything seems to be fair game once the rules of a “competition” are announced.

Artgobblers starts with a whitelist free mint which on some level ensures a much broader distribution base even if we see the supply accrete in the hands of a few and this other mechanism which will allow Artgobblers to be minted for the upcoming decade, VRGDAs (Variable rate Gradual Dutch Auctions).

One of the most misconstrued and ill-thought parts of NFT games and design has been how NFT distribution has occurred and how it doesn’t allow for the mass adoption of a game.

I remember this time when I wanted to apply Axie Infinity last year around June; I bought an Axie for 0.2 eth and started the game thinking it would be enough and was displeased at the sight that I required three Axies to play the game (Ya I’m probably a poor pleb) which would require me to buy it for almost one eth in total (my luck was such that I found the game just before its run to being a billion dollar game was starting), A few thousand dollars to just have the taste of the game is something that no gamer will ever pay even if it were the most anticipated game in history.

In an attempt to embrace the ethos of non-fungibility, on-chain game creators misconstrue or leave simple ideas from general game design behind, i.e. to make it accessible for as many people as possible by gating access behind the need for an NFT, you sort of announce that you are just making this game for the few hundreds or at max thousand of holders that your NFT collection has. It is pretty surprising to me that almost no one ever talks about this caveat when talking about web3 games.

Most crypto “game” developers sort of offset this argument by saying that NFT collections are like luxury skins/luxury collectables to give them a better taste of the game while they might release auxiliary supplies which would still allow for access to the game but in a more “standard” edition instead of the limited edition manner that the OG collection of the said game might have. The issue with any such idea is that you immediately drive a wedge in the minds of those playing the game that you are making a play to win games where skill might not matter, or you might not have a shot at getting better “loots” or digging rare stuff with your standard edition NFTs. A lot of game developers in the web3 space seem to pride themselves on saying that their smaller 10k collection will be OG and will have unique features when the game will be launched, including boosted drops, better stats etc., which might help them boost their sales but will probably never help their adoption. In retrospection, a few years later, I think this is something most people will notice and try to address (just my guess).

Now that I’ve motivated the problem, what are the different ways of solving this problem? As mentioned earlier, you make additional less valuable collectables with infinite supplies, which allow access to the game by anyone who owns it, thus also reducing the upfront cost of access, this has been tried by the loot, mloot projects last year. Another way might be to allow an infinite or a large finite distribution but start with a limited supply and gradually inflate supply, thus allowing everyone to be on equal grounds and not making them feel they own something less superior but not overextending your supply (this idea is very good for beta-testing to the main launch of a game because you can slowly stress test your system while adding players systematically). How do you price or release these NFTs? This is where VRGDAs come in.

Note: Not that this might not be entirely true in the case of Artgobblers itself, but VRGDAs are a promising way of steadily growing supply and pricing it through supply and demand. At the same time, there might be instances where you might want to choose a fixed cost of access and keep releasing X amount every day at the same cost. VRGDAs are a promising alternative and probably an ingenious way of NFT supply distribution. Artgobblers itself is just starting with a 2k mint and will have 8k more over the next decade. Anyone who knows on-chain greed probably knows that it will be priced at a level out of the reach of most people who might want it; even then, it is an interesting experiment to study what happens when you grow supply beyond initial mints in low-supply assets. Digidaigakus, a recent project with a 2k mint, are currently priced at 10eth and went up to as high as 20eth but was not as hyped as Artgobblers, so if it achieves the blue-chip status, a 2k supply achieving a 100eth floor, is not something wild. (While price prediction is not my milieu, Just doing this cost analysis to show how out of reach the collection might be to people).

Auctions have found a very prominent application in crypto, mostly in places like Foundation, Superare, Makersplace, and Zora, for creators to sell 1/1 pieces they make. Auctions are a very good form of gauging the demand for a particular asset and help in the total price discovery of an asset. In the case of 1/1s, almost every popular art piece in history has been sold through auctions at sotheby’s, christies by various collectors.

Usually, asset auctions occur in a way where a bidder first bids and then other bidders outbid until the top most bid wins in the case of physically settled auctions, we see the auctioneer calling out the top bid and asking if anyone else is present in the case of online auctions like that we see in 1/1 NFTs a reserve price is first set and then about a 24-hour onchain auction begins and whoever has the highest bid at the end of it wins the auctions).

Dutch auctions, also called descending price auctions (more self-explanatory this way), are a type of auction in which the auctioneer starts with a very high price and then gradually lowers it stepwise until someone places a bid. The first bid which is placed wins the auction, thus avoiding any further bid wars.

Dutch auctions, in the case of financial assets, have a slightly different form where in everyone submits a bid, and then a price to sell it at the highest value is arrived at. This value is arrived at by taking the cut-off price, i.e. the lowest successful price, and the remaining money is returned to everyone above the threshold. Simply looking at an example, If there are 200 bidders for 100 shares and the 100th bidder bid about 50$ and the 1st bidder bid about 1000$, the cutoff price, in this case, is 50, and that’s the value the entire auction settles at which the top 100 bidders pay. Although Dutch auctions have found their place in crypto, they are too efficient compared to those seen in traditional markets because onchain auctions are entirely public, so price discovery is complete, while traditional markets have a more predictive nature, leaving some scope for further price discovery. There are no sealed bid auctions onchain currently available on-chain.

Dutch auctions are not great for big supplies because price discovery occurs pre-mint while the expectation of a rational actor might prefer price discovery to occur after. This take definitely discounts those collections which might be low-key or have some announcements post mint there in some information, in this case, is not priced in.

Gradual Dutch Auctions, GDAs, was a mechanism designed to sell “illiquid assets”, in our case, low supply NFT collections. While both discrete and continuous GDAs over various functions exist, one way of thinking of Gradual dutch auctions is that the sale of tokens happens in batches where each batch is a regular dutch auction settled at some price. Every incremental auction starts at a higher price. For simplicity, a batch size of 1 gives you an intuition that every time period T, a new NFT auction is conducted, so over time, the price discovery is smoother instead of settling all NFTs at the same price. How is this price determined? While a variety of functions could be applicable here, this is one such choice.

n here is the number of NFTs sold, alpha is the scaling factor, lambda is the decay constant, t is the period, and k is the initial price set. If you set the decay constant to 0 and, the initial price to k=1, the scaling factor to 1.1, then the auctions should be priced 1, 1.1, 1.21 etc. Another example which shows the cumulative sale cost from the blog

One drawback of GDA auctions would be the inflexibility of scheduling the price of these auctions, where every auction starts at a higher price while being unaware of supply/demand dynamics. Let’s just say you had some schedule for the supply increase in mind; simple GDAs would not be very helpful in this case, and while they would work you could see a longer turnaround time for auction completion.

Variable Rate Gradual Dutch Auctions (VRGDAs) are schedule-aware Gradual dutch auctions where in projects could release supply according to some distribution curve they have in mind. Simply put, from the blog:

Variable Rate GDAs (VRGDAs), designed for Art Gobblers and used in 0xMonaco, let you sell tokens close to a custom schedule over time by raising prices when sales are ahead of schedule and lowering prices when sales are behind schedule.

Such schedule-aware pricing increases the price of the tokens if more supply is released ahead of time and decreases the price if a lot of the supply is unsold, thus making it easier to buy tokens and thus trying to spur interest. The ingeniousness of this design mechanism is simple demand/supply price dynamics directly priced in through a price function. (I’m a fan). A variety of release schedules are thus possible, e.g., linear, square root, or perhaps triangular can also be considered an interesting experiment.

Gobble gobble.

The Artgobblers renaissance isn’t about what I have covered in the article, but it’s about bringing it all together in the form of a “complete” on-chain game. Complete as in the game will be released in its final form, and no further developments will happen from the team. It’ll be a complete NFT project (rare given how most NFT projects count on “roadmaps” to secure further funding or spur more interest in their project, the only exception to this probably is Cryptopunks, Ethereum’s first NFT project, which is more a cultural phenomenon in crypto now).

So what is the flywheel that Artgobblers is trying to set in motion to find its place as a cultural collection central to not just crypto but perhaps beyond crypto as well?

The draw tool was released in august for artists to draw various art with support for iPad and desktop. The draw tool also records the entire process of creation so you can take a look at the entire process when you are done making an art piece, akin to time-lapse recording in autodesk sketchbook on iPad and other similar apps.

The draw tool allows for the creation of art and while might see some improvements in the future (not counting on it), is a complete app in itself which has seen some pretty cool art pieces come of out of it.

Once ArtGobblers goes live on 31st October, art made through the draw tool can be minted as a 1/1 NFT on “pages”, another NFT which is a part of the Artgobblers game. This is called “glamination”. Pages are also scarce and are released through VRGDAs just like Gobblers themselves.

A short note: ArtGobblers will be a 2k initial whitelist mint, and the rest of the 8k will be released through VRGDAs over the next ten years while pages are infinite, only 69 pages are released daily slowing down to about 10 per day over time. For more details, refer to the original blog.

Glamination can only be done on empty pages, and these empty pages can only be minted with GOO. GOO is an erc20 token which will be emitted by the Artgobblers.

GOO is a token for the in-game economy of the Artgobblers ecosystem. It has two uses, it can be used to create more gobblers or mint more pages. Gobblers can gobble the pages, at which point the art becomes a part of them.

From a collector's perspective, a gobbler is a museum NFT that you can own to store your favourite art pieces that have been minted through the draw tool. Regardless of the popularity of the NFT collection itself, the NFT space, in general, has seen a considerable uptick of collectors of 1/1s who have showcased their NFTs in various ways owning spaces in virtual VR spaces or otherwise. An NFT of NFTs such as ArtGobblers is probably the first of its kind but not the last. NFT museums might be here to stay.

The game of GOO, an erc20 token that will be emitted by gobblers, will probably have the attention of the collectors for the next few weeks. As has been common in the space, erc20 tokens attached to NFTs have acted as pseudo-price discovery mechanisms and an alternative way of finding a market cap for such collections, an important distinction made by the team before hand, in this case is GOO isn’t meant to be anything beyond an in-game token with specific use only for collectors and other players in the Artgobblers ecosystem and is pretty much valueless to speculators (which might not stop people from going after this relatively low supply token that it might be for the first few weeks to months).

GOO is emitted by Gobblers (as I’m probably writing for the third time), and every owner will have a constant production of this token, so owning this without a gobbler essentially means you are at risk of dilution. (A very similar mechanism was found in OHM and OHM forks last year. Ideally, you owned a certain percentage of the supply, and then you staked it, and there was constant issuance of ohm by which you would always own that percentage of the supply, the keyword here being ideally since other dynamics at play almost always ensured that you did get diluted, so it quite didn’t work out that way).

In the case of GOO, every gobbler has a goo issuance, and every gobbler has a goo issuance multiplier. Owning multiple gobblers with different multipliers is the same as having one gobbler with the sum of those multipliers.

This multiplier dynamics of goo issuance at play gives rise to different strategies. One such recollection by a beta-tester, Misaka:

The dynamics involve variables which involve thinking about how much goo you make, how you pool your gobblers to maximize issuance and the fact that Artgobblers can only be minted with GOO and that empty pages can also only be minted with goo. Some highlights from the thread around these dynamics are

• everyone was in a prisoner dilemma and kept pushing the price of @artgobblers up.

• You could acquire a legendary gobbler by burning a huge amount of @artgobblers in exchange for a Gobbler with 2x the total Gobblers’ multiplier you burned.

• The price of @artgobblers quickly went from 10k to 24k $GOO in 2 days after launch

Ultimately it was found that people who had gobblers would probably end up colluding/ making by coalitions to ensure/maximize their production and have a better edge for pricing/acquiring gobbler NFTs. This was something also found in Spearbit’s audit of Artgobblers

The entire gameplay in a chart looks something like this

In a recent question to t11s, he mentioned that Artgobblers could gobble any art that is fed to them i.e. any ERC721/ERC1155, which would probably mean that all Artgobblers are NFT museums from the day they are minted. This would only require further support from someone in the community to display these since their front end will only support the pages. This way, once the initial few weeks of Artgobblers are over, they will pretty much become unique 1/1 museums depending on the collector that owns them, which is quite an exciting experiment in the NFT collectable landscape.

ArtGobblers, if it succeeds, will probably find itself only second to the marvel of Cryptopunks in becoming the zeitgeist of NFTs, especially those involving onchain games. It would also serve as a playbook for people who wonder if every onchain game has to be an elaborate MOBA/MMORPG or something else. It would vindicate the idea that token supply and collection dynamics can also serve as a simple onchain game.

The ArtGobblers renaissance starts once the mint is complete on the 31st of October, and we then have a lovely study of various onchain dynamics and possibly the start of a small niche cultural movement in crypto. My bet on it lasting long due to degen collectors in crypto and defining collector zeitgeist for a few years or perhaps decades to come.

NFT Distribution paradigms, Complete on-chain games and a potentially new meta.

Art gobblers is probably one of the most exciting projects coming out this quarter of the year. Several different components have slowly led up to it, so just a “short” article looking at various aspects of this project and probably another NFT blue-chip is you are to believe the echo chambers that I am a part of.

One of the core problems in crypto, whether it be the tokenomics of a project or even in the NFT space, is the question,” what is a fair distribution of a supply?” Put in other ways, how do you distribute things in the right way (and what is “right”)? While when it comes to airdropping a supply of tokens, there is no correct answer, and a search for a good answer continues, you would think that this might be somewhat different in the case of NFTs. Regardless of low supply dynamics, if there’s something common in the general crypto landscape is an eventual accretion of supply in the hands of a few whales or super-collectors. Most people seem to agree that supply should be in the hands of more people than fewer, at least when the distribution starts.

In the case of token supplies, a lot of this can be traced back to Sybil practices in the case of airdropped supplies or simple whale acquisition during distribution phases, i.e. when the coin dumps a lot and the whale just buys a considerable part of the supply. But more common than not, even the genesis distribution of most token supplies looks much more skewed than you would want them to be, irrespective of various rules/anti-Sybil practices that might be in place. Of course, some of this can be attributed to the fact that sometimes core “contributors” or early believers (other than the team itself) of a project can be chosen to be airdropped a more significant piece of the pie because they’ve been with the team since the start and this is just one way of thanking everything they’ve done.

Now that my short digression ends, how does any of this compare to NFTs, and what does this have to do with art gobblers? NFTs have had a variety of ways of genesis distribution, they originally started with crypto punks which was a free mint back in 2017/18 (I think), and in this past cycle, it started with hashmasks choosing the bonding curve, which went on for quite some time, then started free mints again which were quite possibly some of the worst ways of distributing assets because it devolved to on-chain gas wars noticeable if you follow the ETH gas fees in any year the spikes mostly corresponding to NFT mints rather than crashes, these free mints somewhat also get exploited by bots but in the free wild forest that we describe our chain environment as anything seems to be fair game once the rules of a “competition” are announced.

Artgobblers starts with a whitelist free mint which on some level ensures a much broader distribution base even if we see the supply accrete in the hands of a few and this other mechanism which will allow Artgobblers to be minted for the upcoming decade, VRGDAs (Variable rate Gradual Dutch Auctions).

One of the most misconstrued and ill-thought parts of NFT games and design has been how NFT distribution has occurred and how it doesn’t allow for the mass adoption of a game.

I remember this time when I wanted to apply Axie Infinity last year around June; I bought an Axie for 0.2 eth and started the game thinking it would be enough and was displeased at the sight that I required three Axies to play the game (Ya I’m probably a poor pleb) which would require me to buy it for almost one eth in total (my luck was such that I found the game just before its run to being a billion dollar game was starting), A few thousand dollars to just have the taste of the game is something that no gamer will ever pay even if it were the most anticipated game in history.

In an attempt to embrace the ethos of non-fungibility, on-chain game creators misconstrue or leave simple ideas from general game design behind, i.e. to make it accessible for as many people as possible by gating access behind the need for an NFT, you sort of announce that you are just making this game for the few hundreds or at max thousand of holders that your NFT collection has. It is pretty surprising to me that almost no one ever talks about this caveat when talking about web3 games.

Most crypto “game” developers sort of offset this argument by saying that NFT collections are like luxury skins/luxury collectables to give them a better taste of the game while they might release auxiliary supplies which would still allow for access to the game but in a more “standard” edition instead of the limited edition manner that the OG collection of the said game might have. The issue with any such idea is that you immediately drive a wedge in the minds of those playing the game that you are making a play to win games where skill might not matter, or you might not have a shot at getting better “loots” or digging rare stuff with your standard edition NFTs. A lot of game developers in the web3 space seem to pride themselves on saying that their smaller 10k collection will be OG and will have unique features when the game will be launched, including boosted drops, better stats etc., which might help them boost their sales but will probably never help their adoption. In retrospection, a few years later, I think this is something most people will notice and try to address (just my guess).

Now that I’ve motivated the problem, what are the different ways of solving this problem? As mentioned earlier, you make additional less valuable collectables with infinite supplies, which allow access to the game by anyone who owns it, thus also reducing the upfront cost of access, this has been tried by the loot, mloot projects last year. Another way might be to allow an infinite or a large finite distribution but start with a limited supply and gradually inflate supply, thus allowing everyone to be on equal grounds and not making them feel they own something less superior but not overextending your supply (this idea is very good for beta-testing to the main launch of a game because you can slowly stress test your system while adding players systematically). How do you price or release these NFTs? This is where VRGDAs come in.

Note: Not that this might not be entirely true in the case of Artgobblers itself, but VRGDAs are a promising way of steadily growing supply and pricing it through supply and demand. At the same time, there might be instances where you might want to choose a fixed cost of access and keep releasing X amount every day at the same cost. VRGDAs are a promising alternative and probably an ingenious way of NFT supply distribution. Artgobblers itself is just starting with a 2k mint and will have 8k more over the next decade. Anyone who knows on-chain greed probably knows that it will be priced at a level out of the reach of most people who might want it; even then, it is an interesting experiment to study what happens when you grow supply beyond initial mints in low-supply assets. Digidaigakus, a recent project with a 2k mint, are currently priced at 10eth and went up to as high as 20eth but was not as hyped as Artgobblers, so if it achieves the blue-chip status, a 2k supply achieving a 100eth floor, is not something wild. (While price prediction is not my milieu, Just doing this cost analysis to show how out of reach the collection might be to people).

Auctions have found a very prominent application in crypto, mostly in places like Foundation, Superare, Makersplace, and Zora, for creators to sell 1/1 pieces they make. Auctions are a very good form of gauging the demand for a particular asset and help in the total price discovery of an asset. In the case of 1/1s, almost every popular art piece in history has been sold through auctions at sotheby’s, christies by various collectors.

Usually, asset auctions occur in a way where a bidder first bids and then other bidders outbid until the top most bid wins in the case of physically settled auctions, we see the auctioneer calling out the top bid and asking if anyone else is present in the case of online auctions like that we see in 1/1 NFTs a reserve price is first set and then about a 24-hour onchain auction begins and whoever has the highest bid at the end of it wins the auctions).

Dutch auctions, also called descending price auctions (more self-explanatory this way), are a type of auction in which the auctioneer starts with a very high price and then gradually lowers it stepwise until someone places a bid. The first bid which is placed wins the auction, thus avoiding any further bid wars.

Dutch auctions, in the case of financial assets, have a slightly different form where in everyone submits a bid, and then a price to sell it at the highest value is arrived at. This value is arrived at by taking the cut-off price, i.e. the lowest successful price, and the remaining money is returned to everyone above the threshold. Simply looking at an example, If there are 200 bidders for 100 shares and the 100th bidder bid about 50$ and the 1st bidder bid about 1000$, the cutoff price, in this case, is 50, and that’s the value the entire auction settles at which the top 100 bidders pay. Although Dutch auctions have found their place in crypto, they are too efficient compared to those seen in traditional markets because onchain auctions are entirely public, so price discovery is complete, while traditional markets have a more predictive nature, leaving some scope for further price discovery. There are no sealed bid auctions onchain currently available on-chain.

Dutch auctions are not great for big supplies because price discovery occurs pre-mint while the expectation of a rational actor might prefer price discovery to occur after. This take definitely discounts those collections which might be low-key or have some announcements post mint there in some information, in this case, is not priced in.

Gradual Dutch Auctions, GDAs, was a mechanism designed to sell “illiquid assets”, in our case, low supply NFT collections. While both discrete and continuous GDAs over various functions exist, one way of thinking of Gradual dutch auctions is that the sale of tokens happens in batches where each batch is a regular dutch auction settled at some price. Every incremental auction starts at a higher price. For simplicity, a batch size of 1 gives you an intuition that every time period T, a new NFT auction is conducted, so over time, the price discovery is smoother instead of settling all NFTs at the same price. How is this price determined? While a variety of functions could be applicable here, this is one such choice.

n here is the number of NFTs sold, alpha is the scaling factor, lambda is the decay constant, t is the period, and k is the initial price set. If you set the decay constant to 0 and, the initial price to k=1, the scaling factor to 1.1, then the auctions should be priced 1, 1.1, 1.21 etc. Another example which shows the cumulative sale cost from the blog

One drawback of GDA auctions would be the inflexibility of scheduling the price of these auctions, where every auction starts at a higher price while being unaware of supply/demand dynamics. Let’s just say you had some schedule for the supply increase in mind; simple GDAs would not be very helpful in this case, and while they would work you could see a longer turnaround time for auction completion.

Variable Rate Gradual Dutch Auctions (VRGDAs) are schedule-aware Gradual dutch auctions where in projects could release supply according to some distribution curve they have in mind. Simply put, from the blog:

Variable Rate GDAs (VRGDAs), designed for Art Gobblers and used in 0xMonaco, let you sell tokens close to a custom schedule over time by raising prices when sales are ahead of schedule and lowering prices when sales are behind schedule.

Such schedule-aware pricing increases the price of the tokens if more supply is released ahead of time and decreases the price if a lot of the supply is unsold, thus making it easier to buy tokens and thus trying to spur interest. The ingeniousness of this design mechanism is simple demand/supply price dynamics directly priced in through a price function. (I’m a fan). A variety of release schedules are thus possible, e.g., linear, square root, or perhaps triangular can also be considered an interesting experiment.

Gobble gobble.

The Artgobblers renaissance isn’t about what I have covered in the article, but it’s about bringing it all together in the form of a “complete” on-chain game. Complete as in the game will be released in its final form, and no further developments will happen from the team. It’ll be a complete NFT project (rare given how most NFT projects count on “roadmaps” to secure further funding or spur more interest in their project, the only exception to this probably is Cryptopunks, Ethereum’s first NFT project, which is more a cultural phenomenon in crypto now).

So what is the flywheel that Artgobblers is trying to set in motion to find its place as a cultural collection central to not just crypto but perhaps beyond crypto as well?

The draw tool was released in august for artists to draw various art with support for iPad and desktop. The draw tool also records the entire process of creation so you can take a look at the entire process when you are done making an art piece, akin to time-lapse recording in autodesk sketchbook on iPad and other similar apps.

The draw tool allows for the creation of art and while might see some improvements in the future (not counting on it), is a complete app in itself which has seen some pretty cool art pieces come of out of it.

Once ArtGobblers goes live on 31st October, art made through the draw tool can be minted as a 1/1 NFT on “pages”, another NFT which is a part of the Artgobblers game. This is called “glamination”. Pages are also scarce and are released through VRGDAs just like Gobblers themselves.

A short note: ArtGobblers will be a 2k initial whitelist mint, and the rest of the 8k will be released through VRGDAs over the next ten years while pages are infinite, only 69 pages are released daily slowing down to about 10 per day over time. For more details, refer to the original blog.

Glamination can only be done on empty pages, and these empty pages can only be minted with GOO. GOO is an erc20 token which will be emitted by the Artgobblers.

GOO is a token for the in-game economy of the Artgobblers ecosystem. It has two uses, it can be used to create more gobblers or mint more pages. Gobblers can gobble the pages, at which point the art becomes a part of them.

From a collector's perspective, a gobbler is a museum NFT that you can own to store your favourite art pieces that have been minted through the draw tool. Regardless of the popularity of the NFT collection itself, the NFT space, in general, has seen a considerable uptick of collectors of 1/1s who have showcased their NFTs in various ways owning spaces in virtual VR spaces or otherwise. An NFT of NFTs such as ArtGobblers is probably the first of its kind but not the last. NFT museums might be here to stay.

The game of GOO, an erc20 token that will be emitted by gobblers, will probably have the attention of the collectors for the next few weeks. As has been common in the space, erc20 tokens attached to NFTs have acted as pseudo-price discovery mechanisms and an alternative way of finding a market cap for such collections, an important distinction made by the team before hand, in this case is GOO isn’t meant to be anything beyond an in-game token with specific use only for collectors and other players in the Artgobblers ecosystem and is pretty much valueless to speculators (which might not stop people from going after this relatively low supply token that it might be for the first few weeks to months).

GOO is emitted by Gobblers (as I’m probably writing for the third time), and every owner will have a constant production of this token, so owning this without a gobbler essentially means you are at risk of dilution. (A very similar mechanism was found in OHM and OHM forks last year. Ideally, you owned a certain percentage of the supply, and then you staked it, and there was constant issuance of ohm by which you would always own that percentage of the supply, the keyword here being ideally since other dynamics at play almost always ensured that you did get diluted, so it quite didn’t work out that way).

In the case of GOO, every gobbler has a goo issuance, and every gobbler has a goo issuance multiplier. Owning multiple gobblers with different multipliers is the same as having one gobbler with the sum of those multipliers.

This multiplier dynamics of goo issuance at play gives rise to different strategies. One such recollection by a beta-tester, Misaka:

The dynamics involve variables which involve thinking about how much goo you make, how you pool your gobblers to maximize issuance and the fact that Artgobblers can only be minted with GOO and that empty pages can also only be minted with goo. Some highlights from the thread around these dynamics are

• everyone was in a prisoner dilemma and kept pushing the price of @artgobblers up.

• You could acquire a legendary gobbler by burning a huge amount of @artgobblers in exchange for a Gobbler with 2x the total Gobblers’ multiplier you burned.

• The price of @artgobblers quickly went from 10k to 24k $GOO in 2 days after launch

Ultimately it was found that people who had gobblers would probably end up colluding/ making by coalitions to ensure/maximize their production and have a better edge for pricing/acquiring gobbler NFTs. This was something also found in Spearbit’s audit of Artgobblers

The entire gameplay in a chart looks something like this

In a recent question to t11s, he mentioned that Artgobblers could gobble any art that is fed to them i.e. any ERC721/ERC1155, which would probably mean that all Artgobblers are NFT museums from the day they are minted. This would only require further support from someone in the community to display these since their front end will only support the pages. This way, once the initial few weeks of Artgobblers are over, they will pretty much become unique 1/1 museums depending on the collector that owns them, which is quite an exciting experiment in the NFT collectable landscape.

ArtGobblers, if it succeeds, will probably find itself only second to the marvel of Cryptopunks in becoming the zeitgeist of NFTs, especially those involving onchain games. It would also serve as a playbook for people who wonder if every onchain game has to be an elaborate MOBA/MMORPG or something else. It would vindicate the idea that token supply and collection dynamics can also serve as a simple onchain game.

The ArtGobblers renaissance starts once the mint is complete on the 31st of October, and we then have a lovely study of various onchain dynamics and possibly the start of a small niche cultural movement in crypto. My bet on it lasting long due to degen collectors in crypto and defining collector zeitgeist for a few years or perhaps decades to come.