The Rise and Fall of Art Gobblers.
How influencers, a VC, and DeFi got crushed by the people.
What is Art Gobblers?
An NFT collection created by Justin Roiland and backed by Paradigm which consisted of an initial free mint of 2,000 fully animated Gobblers. Art Gobblers dubbs themselves a “decentralized art factory” owned by aliens. The project is an on-chain art-based game as the name suggests the Art Gobblers, gobble art. The art they gobble is created by holders using their “draw tool” once complete, the drawing is turned into 1/1 NFTs, gobbled, and put on display in the “Belly Gallery” forever.
Over the next 10 years, players will spend ‘Goo’ the project's native token to mint 8,000 more Gobblers. All Art Gobblers produce Goo tokens, it’s required to spend Goo on blank pages to produce more 1/1 of art to feed their Gobbler. If you’d like to take a deep dive into the logic behind GOO (Gradual Ownership Optimization) you check out the GOO Paper. At a very high-level GOO is an ERC20 token emitted by Art Gobblers that grows faster every day, starting at hundreds and eventually reaching billions and beyond.
Who is Justin Roiland?
For those of you who have been living under a pop-culture rock for the last decade. Justin Roiland is a voice actor, animator, writer, and director, and he’s best known as the co-creator of the hit animated show Rick & Morty. Art Gobblers isn’t Justin’s first foray into NFTs in January ’21 he launched the collection “The Best I Could Do” with Nifty Gateway. His highest-selling piece was an homage to the Simpsons called “The Smintons” which sold for $290,100.
What is Paradigm VC?
Paradigm is an investment firm focusing on backing disruptive crypto/Web3 companies and protocols. The firm’s portfolio includes holdings in Blur, Magic Eden, Citadel, Coinbase, Argent, Fractal, Osmosis, and FTX to name a few.
How were the allowlist spots given out?
With the initial mint supply being capped at 2K and for free. You are probably wondering how in fact people got spots. There were two paths to getting an allowlist.
Path 1: Grind Discord, make art, grind Twitter, get your art selected earn an allowlist spot.
Path 2: Be an influencer or an investor in Blur.
How did the mint go?
As previously stated the 2,000 Art Gobblers were minted for free. What happened when they hit secondary? The collection opened with a 14 ETH floor.
Now, I have seen my fair share of free-to-mints over the last 180 days. Especially at the peak of degen season. Never once have I seen a free mint open at such a high floor price in the middle of a terrible macro economical situation. I have watched many free-to-mints grind from 0.01 floors all the way up to 2ETH+ floors and beyond, but it takes time, volume, and the right art. But! They all follow the same pattern rise from the bottom to something respectable and beyond. We could speculate that the combination of this being an art drop by Justin Roiland and the project being backed by Paradigm that traders and collectors would be inherently bullish.
Though many people who got an allowlist through path 1, were from what I can tell somewhat inexperienced traders looking for a large sum of money for the first time in their lives. Just look at this thread below from some of the many people that got life-changing money.
The question remains…how did they know to initially list at 15 ETH. Some outside speculators were preparing to have up to 8ETH ready to deploy to buy on secondary. We are talking about a market that has been drying up for months amidst a global recession, and suddenly there are millions of dollars in sidelined liquidity ready to deploy at 15 ETH? Just look at the monthly volume chart below.
The Influencers
What started out as a seemingly innocent copypasta quickly degraded into either a complete conspiracy theory or a coordinated pump-n-dump. What many people realized after a series of copypasta tweets came out from influencers throughout twitter is that they hadn’t even heard of Art Gobblers up until that point. The tweet in question went live 24 hours before the mint.
After the tweets went viral and the insane volume that took place on secondary, many were left questioning what exactly is going on.
Here is where things get a little sticky
As I previously mentioned Paradigm is an investor in the marketplace Blur. Why is this relevant? Well, almost all the secondary trading volume for Art Gobblers took place on Blur and it turns out that most of the primary influencer investors in Blur were given allowlists spots to Art Gobblers. There was so much volume on Blur that they even tweeted about it.
As you can see from the tweets above there is an incentive to use Blur. At some point in November, Blur plans to do an airdrop of their token $BLUR for all active traders on the aggregator. It almost feels like an incentive to perhaps even wash trade on the platform to secure a $BLUR bag at the end of the month.
The argument could be made that this is the new trend and the majority of traders have decided to move to Blur in order to skirt marketplace fees, royalty fees, and farm for the airdrop. However, two days after the mint of Art Gobblers another very hyped collection called KPR launched with 10K tokens and nearly all the secondary volume took place on OpenSea.
If you click the source link below the image you can clearly see that overwhelmingly all sales for KPR have taken place on OpenSea. This raises some alarm bells right? Art Gobblers is almost exclusively traded on Blur to the point that Blur surpasses OpenSea in volume. Only for all that volume to pull back over the course of 72 hours and return to OpenSea.
The volume of trades on Blur has drastically slowed what does this mean for Art Gobblers? After reaching a peak of 24 ETH floor, it’s now hovering over at around 4 ETH.
What caused the pullback on Art Gobblers?
We have a famous animator, with venture capital backing testing a self-sustaining tokenomics model with a gamification layer. It sounds like Art Gobblers has all the ingredients to be a wildly successful project. Yet, in less than a week, it is teetering on the verge of collapse.
It started with a few non-influencers calling out the project for pushing a pump-and-dump scheme on followers.
Then things start to get a little weird
Justin Roiland has a somewhat tainted past of producing animations that hypersexualize children and child mutilation. If you are sensitive to any of these topics I’d suggest not watching the videos below. They started circulating on Twitter in 2018.
To help promote Art Gobblers leading up to the mint a few influencers created anon accounts to contribute to the “lore” of the Gobblers. The characters were Balthazar Crumps managed by Andr3w, Flurb Snabsnibbins, NedJeffers, and ImHiDude. All of the accounts were using plays on words with the term Goo but one account seemingly took things too far to be considered in good taste. The account Balthazar Crumps was roleplaying as a 13-year-old making hypersexualized tweets. The 13-year-old part of the bio has since been removed. However, not before many people could get a screenshot of it like below.
Now, we have influencers being called out for pumping and dumping a free mint. Allegations of the creator Justin Roiland being linked to some very questionable animations. An influencer LARPing as a 13-year-old who likes to smell his own goo, and a VC tied to both the project and the only marketplace the tokens were traded on.
Seeing all of this play out over the past 13 days has left me with a lot of questions and sadly not enough answers. Are we actually onboarding new users into the space with these types of projects? Is this just another cash grab in the long list of cash grabs that have taken place? Should we be trusting any influencers in the space? Should influencers actually be held accountable to FTC guidelines for disclosing paid endorsements? How active of a role should VCs be playing? The Art Gobblers' art is absolutely mid at best, the only cache it had was the fact that Justin Roiland was behind it. Did it have some novel mechanics to it, of course, but is that enough based on how everything rolled out? It doesn’t feel like it was. At the end of the day, insiders maximized profits, DeFi maxis took their profits through the laundromat on Blur, and retail was yet again left with a pile of goo to clean up.
How do you feel about Art Gobblers?
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