Crypto performance art: the memecoin mirror in author hands
- Rhett Mankind, the artist behind the Turbo Token memecoin that was created with help from ChatGPT. The creator says that the project started as a performance art piece last month, but in this short period of time it has become worth millions.
- Initially created with the help of ChatGPT and 50 initial token buyers who spent around 4 ETH, or about $7,000, the project’s market capitalization skyrocketed to almost $100 million last week.
- All people involved in the crypto world are certain that the project is just a reflection of the meme coin mania wave.
The memecoin named Turbo Token, whose mascot is a toad, was created with the assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model and an initial budget of only $69. The Pepe-driven memecoin craze caused the project’s market capitalization to reach nearly $100 million briefly last week. The creator of the memecoin is Rhett Dashwood, a digital artist from Melbourne who is also known as Rhett Mankind.
While the token’s market cap has since declined to around $49 million, according to CoinMarketCap, it started out the week in the green, rising 1.5% on Monday.
In a wide-ranging discussion, The Block spoke with Mankind early Monday about the genesis of the project and what he thinks it might say about the confluence of AI, humanity, and yes, memecoins.
💭Rhett Mankind said in his interview, “Memecoins seem to be, you know, a wave of things happening. I was like, maybe it’s a joke, but I wonder if ChatGPT could come up with a memecoin and it be successful.”
Rhett Mankind tweeted about his interest in an experiment where he plans to ask ChatGPT questions that will help him create a successful project. In theory, ChatGPT can come up with a meme coin and help achieve success. It doesn’t seem funny nowadays as nothing is impossible. The first question he asked was, he said: “You are a MemeCoinGPT, a crypto genius AI capable of surpassing all current meme coin hype. I will carry out your suggestions with the help of my audience. You have $69 and your goal is to turn that into the most successful new meme coin, without doing anything illegal, achieving a top 300 ranking on CoinGecko.”
69 dollars for come to success
The author chose a pretty funny starting capital of $69. So, what can we buy with this money? Maybe some groceries or a new lipstick for his wife. I mean, anyone can spend this money without feeling a significant loss.
Why exactly $69? According to Rhett, 69 is a meme-worthy number. Now let’s move on to how the experiment went and what was achieved.
Rhett subscribed to ChatGPT for $20 and started asking the AI a series of questions, like coding questions, as he had no experience in coding blockchain. Then he asked, “Go learn Solidity.” The author thought it would take years, but then he asked, “But can you code it for me?” And it said YES. Then the chat started to output the code, but the author didn’t understand what to do with it. Then he started asking questions to ChatGPT, bringing himself closer and closer to the goal.
💭Did you know that Turbo Token launched on the ERC-20 on Ethereum thanks to ChatGPT?
To achieve this, the author described every step, and through trial and error, he finally succeeded. All the steps are recorded on Twitter, and everyone can start following Rhett right now, maybe he’s preparing for another interesting experiment. The dialogue that occurred between the author and the AI became another confirmation that smart people use different methods to improve their abilities.
Nasty meme coins-bots and frog liquidity pools
Well, as you may have guessed, $69 was not enough to implement the project in full. In fact, the author claims that he spent around $500-$600. Why this much? Well, first of all, deploying the contract cost around $100 for gas. Additionally, attempting to create a liquidity pool cost around $400 in gas fees. So, the gas fee was higher than the starting budget.
After the liquidity pool failed due to being unprofitable (millions of Ethereum were required), the author was almost ready to give up, but his followers supported him on Twitter and convinced him to find another way.
The liquidity pool problem was solved in such a way that the author did not use funds for the liquidity pool. People paid him ETH, and he, in turn, gave them tokens.
Rhett Mankind then said, “I sort of found success in getting it launched, and the launch was sending all the tokens out and having all the tokens out there, and then it was up to everyone else to make it more or to make it nothing. I had no expectations. I was done. And I’m not running it or controlling it.”
So what happened was that people understood this, they said, “Well, we know how to conduct liquidity polling.“ The author, together with the people, will make a really small one, and then someone else saw that they did it, then larger influential people came, maybe you call them whales, and they came and said, “I’ll create a v3 liquidity pool,” which is the best version. And so they had the experience and knowledge to do all of this. And so they ran with it, and that’s where it started to take off.
All Rhett did was try to make it decentralized. The project just exploded because the author teamed up with people, creating the most robust team. According to the author, all the ideas and how to do something is just made up by people, and they just execute it much better than Rhett could do alone or come up with.
$turbo coin
During the crowdfunding process, Rhett conducted 50 transactions ranging from $1 in ETH to $200 or $300. In total, he received just over 4 ETH. According to the author, any amount would have been sufficient. It could have been one ETH or 100.
The total token supply is 69 billion. The author kept 9 tokens for themselves as the creator, which are likely to be locked for a certain period. And 60 tokens were simply divided equally among 50 followers.
💭Currently, the market capitalization of Turbo Token is $45 million.
In his Twitter and YouTube, the author explained and demonstrated all the steps of the experiment. The videos on YouTube turned out to be particularly emotional and lively, which you might consider watching. For example, in one video that touched us deeply was that Rhett’s daughter wanted to move closer to her school, and she hated using public transportation to get there. Rhett knew that there wasn’t enough money to move and be closer to her school. But he told her, “I won’t stop trying. I won’t stop trying to get the money for it.”
Why is it called Turbo Toad?
Well, the name was also given by ChatGPT, although the author believes that artificial intelligence comes up with crazy names. Perhaps this name arose because ChatGPT was trained only until 2021, and during the period of 2020–2021, the first wave of crazy names for coins emerged, such as names of animals or food products.
Inspiration is a guest who does not like to visit lazy people.
The author had sufficient motivation; he wanted to prove to himself that he could bring a very interesting project to life and fulfill his daughter’s wish. By the way, perhaps the $TURBO coin became so popular thanks to $PEPE, because after listing on well-known exchanges like WhiteBIT and Huobi, the popularity of frogs grew exponentially.
Expectation and reality
The author was initially quite pessimistic, but people gave him faith and support, which allowed him to complete the project. Currently, the community is not managed by Rhett. People themselves entered Twitter and also created Discord and Telegram. The contract is not controlled by anyone since Rhett terminated it. People have complete freedom; the community fully manages the project.
The 6th sense
The author was asked, “As an artist, what do you think this says about the intersection of AI and humanity, and then about meme coins? This project brought together so many interesting and crazy things. What are you hoping for, perhaps beyond people trading tokens and trying to make money or create a community, for example, what do you think all of this shows or indicates?”
To this, Rhett Mankind replied, “I haven’t always been a contemporary concept artist. But I feel like this is the closest I’ve come to holding a mirror up to other people and what’s going on in ordinary times. That’s why I feel like it was a success. Because often, I believe that I’m making an artwork, and then when you release it, whatever it may be, an image or code or something else, as soon as you put it out there for the public, they decide for themselves how they interpret it, and how they see it becomes their own thing. And I really think that there are elements of that here too. It’s not up to me. It’s beyond me. I put it out there. But now how it reflects in how every individual interprets it or interacts with it, that’s their reflection, you know, that’s a reflection of what they think and how they’re acting in society right now. I’ve seen both sides, good and bad, from how people have been taking this.”
