Art Gobbler NFTs have started producing GOO, which can be used to generate new Gobbler NFTs—or produce even more GOO. Over time, this monetary system is highly likely to favor early adopters and whales at the expense of everyone else.

Art Gobblers Unleashes GOO Hype

The Art Gobblers economy has kicked off.

Art Gobblers, the factory NFT collection designed by Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and crypto investment firm Paradigm, launched Monday to much fanfare, with the collection’s NFTs immediately selling for upwards of $20,000 on secondary markets—despite being minted for free. 

24 hours later, these Gobbler NFTs started producing GOO tokens. GOO tokens can either be collected in order to expand a Gobbler’s GOO production capabilities, spent to generate new Gobbler NFTs, or used to purchase Art Gobbler Pages. These Pages, when blank, function as digital canvases; owners can choose to stick art pieces of their choosing upon them. Once they are filled, Page NFTs can then be fed to a Gobbler. This transfers the ownership of the art directly to the Gobbler NFT. The stated aim of the project is for Gobblers to become decentralized, tradeable art galleries.

The ability for GOO to generate new Gobbler or Pages NFTs has made the token highly attractive to believers in the project. At the time of writing, GOO is trading for $1,855 in the GOO/WETH pool on Uniswap V3. Gobbler NFTs have also been consistently rising in price, with the cheapest now trading for 16.39 ETH, or a little under $25,500. Considering the price surge and GOO’s utility, market participants are wondering whether GOO is worth investing in. 

Don’t Get Stuck in GOO 

Despite being a crucial part of the Art Gobblers ecosystem, investors are unlikely to profit in the long term from buying the GOO token, even if the NFT collection thrives. Gobbler NFTs can produce an infinite amount of GOO—there is no supply limit. In fact, the more GOO they accumulate, the more GOO they are able to produce. This means that Gobbler NFTs will end up generating an exponential amount of GOO. Since GOO won’t be able to find an exponential number of buyers at the same time, the most probable outcome is for its price to ultimately trend to zero.

Wouldn’t that affect the success of the Art Gobblers project? Not necessarily. Despite being priced in GOO, Gobbler NFTs and Page NFTs use a native pricing mechanism, meaning that these NFTs will see their prices in GOO increase over time regardless of the intrinsic value of GOO itself. 

Gobbler NFTs are therefore the only valuable assets in the Art Gobblers project, but even owning one of those isn’t a guarantee of profit. Due to the way its tokenomics were designed, Art Gobblers rewards early adopters and whales at the expense of future owners—not unlike a pyramid scheme.

Since GOO generation is contingent on Gobbler NFT and GOO ownership, multiple ventures have already pooled resources together in order to increase their GOO production capabilities. Crypto lawyer Adam Cochran launched the Gobbler’s Union, which asks members to contribute ETH in order to buy as many Gobbler NFTs, GOO tokens, and Pages NFTs as possible. GVB Capital member Minion claimed on Twitter to have set up a private pool with other Art Gobblers enthusiasts. A leaderboard showing the wallets with the most Gobblers and GOO has even been created: at the time of writing, the biggest GOO holder owned 64.87 tokens (worth more than $120,300) and 53 Gobblers (worth a minimum of $1.3 million). If you’re unable to keep up with this kind of firepower, it’s probably best for you to stay away from GOO. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.