Art Gobblers Generates $12.35m in Sales in One Day
Top 3 sales since mint
Since the November 1 reveal, buyers and sellers continue to trade Art Gobblers NFTs at a prodigious and expensive rate.
We’ve listed the top three most expensive Art Gobblers (so far) and
Art Gobbler 9949 – Sneezenschmunt Waffle-Gobbledank
Someone paid 21.5 ETH ($33,882.92 at the time) for this blue, orange and greeny-yellow Gobbler. It passed through quite a few wallets before ending up in its current destination.
According to OpenSea’s tools, Art Gobbler 9949 is in the top 5% of rare Gobblers.
Art Gobbler 6016 – Schwant Skort
One keen fan paid 19.98 ETH ($31,507.43 at the time) for this menacing, circular saw-handed orange-red Gobbler. Similar to the NFT above, it has also passed through a few wallets and people have paid well over 32 ETH for it, cumulatively.
Also similar to the one above, Art Gobbler 6016 is the top 5% of the most rare ones from the collection
Art Gobbler 9160 – Gilfpinch Hoobiestank
Someone paid 19.93 ETH ($31,446.35 at the time) Art Gobbler 9160 on November 1, just before the artwork reveal. With a robotic leg, a thumb for a hand and gormless eyes, this may be the saddest-looking of the top three most expensive.
Art Gobbler 9160 is the 419th most rare out of 1,560 Gobblers, putting it inside the top 30%. Had the owner chosen to buy it after the reveal, it’s unlikely they would have paid so much for an NFT that isn’t one of the rarest in the collection.
What are Art Gobblers?
Art Gobblers is a newly-minted NFT project created by Justin Roiland and Paradigm. Roiland is the creator of Rick and Morty while Paradigm is a crypto and Web3 investment firm. The team came together as early as February 2022 and launched their NFT on October 31.
There are a few reasons this project has captured the NFT community’s imagination. Firstly, Justin Roiland is popular among Web3 enthusiasts as the voice and writer behind Rick and Morty.
Second, the concept behind the project is innovative. Users can go to the Art Gobblers site and, in a process called “glamination”, create their own art and mint it as an ERC-721 token. Gobblers can then “gobble” the best artworks and wear them as digital images. Art Gobblers, in effect, become mobile, virtual art galleries.
Minting was free for whitelisted addresses and the 1,700 available Gobblers were claimed in minutes. 300 of the NFTs have been reserved for the project’s creators. The remaining 8,000 will be released over a 10-year period.
Why are people questioning the distribution process?
There are very few regulations around NFTs and there are no rules that govern who can start a project and which users benefit from them. For this reason, Art Gobblers has done nothing wrong. But people are already beginning to question who got on the whitelist and how they were awarded their place.
The image above shows some of the wallets that were airdropped Art Gobblers NFTs. All of them are influential names in the NFT space and were likely whitelisted on the back of their popularity. Below are links to their wallets so you can see what other expensive assets they are holding.
- Farokh
- Zeneca_33
- GrapeDutch (sold theirs for 15.74 ETH)
- Andrew Wang
- BrandonKangFilms (sold for 15 ETH)
- flur (transferred to another wallet)
Grievances have arisen across Web3 Twitter due to the perceived unfairness of people with expensive NFTs getting early and cheap access to more expensive NFTs. But there are no rules about who gets given an NFT. And nobody has any right to automatically receive one themselves.
Art Gobblers isn’t the first project to leverage the clout of big voices to market their NFTs, and they definitely won’t be the last. People are calling the distribution process unfair, but how many of them would be saying the same thing if they’d got a $20,000 Art Gobblers NFT for nearly $0?
What next for Art Gobblers and the NFT industry?
One Twitter user did raise an interesting point about how these tactics will affect NFT culture in general. Pons Asinorum stated that nothing wrong has happened and no laws have been broken. But how much longer will people continue to play the NFT game when borderline insider-trading and rigged giveaways are the norm?
We can see that people are turning away from NFTs in their millions. This graph from DappRadar shows how far the market has fallen since its September-October 2021 peaks. Across all blockchain protocols, total sales were more than $5 billion just over a year ago. Last month, total sales were $0.53 billion.
There are many reasons why people are spending less on NFTs than they were in late-2021. We know that systemic changes to the wider global economy mean users have less free cash for purchasing digital assets. But Pons Asinorum is correct when they say the community will disengage from NFTs if the game is consistently and purposefully rigged against them.
The big artwork reveal will happen in the next few hours and DappRadar will report tomorrow on how this will affect the collection.
