50 times a week, the "imitation game" of Goblin NFT

Written by: 0x21, 0xLaughing, Rhythm BlockBeats

「My precious!」

believe big When some people see the newly promoted "Big Brother" goblintown, their first reaction is Gollum from the Middle-earth world in the movie "Lord of the Rings". Weird sound. Just imagine the effect of repeating the words "wen road map?", "wen token?", and "airdrop!" with a grunt pronunciation.

That's right, on the twitter space of the goblintown NFT that just ended, all holders of goblintown NFT use such a "magic" method , once again brainwashed NFT players, and the screen recordings of twitter space spread wildly among major social media and communities. The three-hour twitter space has been played more than 45,000 times. Even the founder of Neo Tokyo, Ellio Trades, tweeted: "xxx, I also want to make a goblin voice"

There is no Road, anonymous founding team, freemint, CC0, more importantly, it is difficult to directly From any perspective, goblitown NFT is not so "star-like" at all, let alone when the NFT market is experiencing a cold winter. So how did goblintown go from the floor price of 0.04ETH in the secondary market to "against the market" in just 5 days, reaching about 2ETH, and successfully won the OpenSea "ranking one"?

Imitation Game

On May 21, goblintown officially announced the start of mint. In fact, on-chain monitoring showed that on May 20 The daily contract has opened mint, and after the goblintown official push was announced, it has been tepid.

Until the founder of The BlockMike DAOdas said lightly on Twitter that he also participated in this free mint before finally selling out . When everyone thinks that this humble project is also a "picture dog", they don't know that there is still a very crazy viral marketing behind it.

Are we YugaLabs?

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On May 22, as the casting ended, goblintown's official Twitter sent a promotional picture, the content of which was an interesting dialogue between two goblins (English transliteration):

"Have you lost your sense of smell? you smell d(e)af"

"You heard we are from Yuga? You Here(hear) we Yuga?"

"What Yuga? What Yuga(Wat yuga)"

"That monkey. That Monkey (Day munkee)"

"But, we are goblins. But we goblin"

「...」

The dialogue released by goblintown caused restlessness, and for a while players began to think that goblintown might be YugaLabs' hidden NFT project. In fact, this is not nonsense. As early as the beginning of the year, in the more than 90 pages of Deck released by YugaLabs, it was mentioned that there will be a treasure hunt called Trezor (Treasure) Hunt in the middle and late May after the release of Koda. It just so happens that Treasure The word is also changed to "Trezor" through the English transliteration of goblin, and the word "treasure hunting" is also closely related to the image of Goblin.

In YugaLabs' Deck, page 86 of the income statement, it is indeed mentioned that 1% of the income source will be goblin(s).

As this speculation broke out, more and more people joined the army of "proving that goblintown" belongs to YugaLabs.

Someone found an image of one of the suspected YugaLabs team in the avatar of the founding team on the official website of goblintown.

Some people also compare the line thickness of goblintown with BAYC and MAYC.

More and more "careful" evidence to show that there is some connection between goblintown and YugaLabs, even though YugaLabs The official did not make any response, but it did not affect the rapidly rising price of goblintown. It rose from the original 0.04ETH to 0.6ETH in two days. If it is said that "pretending" YugaLabs to make goblintown get a ten-fold increase can stop them here, then we would have underestimated this long-planned "gulu" too much. In fact, their "imitation game" has just begun.

Are we SuperStar?

While NFT players are still speculating that YugaLabs is the behind-the-scenes team of goblintown, and are confused about the authenticity of this "rumor", some new "rumours" It's starting to ferment.

At 4 am on May 22nd, goblintown turned around and turned to the well-known musician "Pengci" Steve Aoki, goblintown official tweeted: "What Yuga Labs? We are Steve Aoki." Steve Aoki is a DJ musician with 9.95 million followers on social media Instagram, 《Pollstar< /a>" named him the highest-grossing electronic dance music artist on a North American tour.

this time "Pengci" is not groundless. There is indeed a rare model in the goblintown NFT collection that looks somewhat similar to Steve Aoki, and this rare model was also released on May 25 by TheSandboxGame bought from the secondary market at a high price of 26ETH.

After "touching porcelain" Steve Aoki, Goblin's "rumor engine" did not seem to stop. Only six hours later, goblintown's official tweet changed again: "We are not Steve Aoki , We are Beeple." Beeple is a well-known digital artist in the circle. He once sold an NFT artwork at Christie's auction house for $69.3 million, breaking the record in the digital art world.

NFT players haven’t woken up yet. Less than 4 hours later, goblintown’s official tweet was changed again in the same format. This time, the target of “Pengci” is Frederic Duquette. Frederic Duquette is a 3D artist from Canada who published a project called "FVCK_CRYSTAL/ //”’s NFT series works, the cumulative transaction volume on OpenSea exceeded 11.5K, and the current floor price remains above 0.6ETH.

On May 25th, when everyone thought that goblintown officials were tired of this "imitation game", a voice of "We are totally Snoop Dogg" went to "pretend" the famous rapper Gouye, this time again piqued everyone's curiosity.

Who is the King of Goblins?

In the movie "The Hobbit", there is a kingdom of goblins under the misty mountains in Middle-earth, and the image of the king of goblins is described as A gigantic, repulsive, fat, evil creature, he sits on a baroque throne, with goblins as a mat for his ascent and departure.

So in the goblintown series, who is the king of goblins? Open and transparent on-chain data revealed some clues.

From the data on the chain, we can see that after goblintown officially deployed the last contract, only 15 minutes later, a contract named mikedudas.eth called the contract "Makingobblin" to mint, and the owner of the mikedudas.eth account is exactly what we mentioned earlier Mike DAOdas, founder of The Block.

Associating the data on the chain with his initial "kind reminder", more and more people speculate that Mike DAOdas is the driving force behind goblintown. Later, there were more and more rumors about this matter, and Mike DAOdas had to come forward to clarify this matter: he did know the goblintown team, but sharing the news of this free mint was just a benefit, and he hardly benefited from it.

Since then, the viral marketing of the team background and behind-the-scenes seems to have come to an end, and the goblintown team used "rumors" to take advantage of it to arouse NFT players The extensive discussion of the Internet, the marketing methods are not unsophisticated.

"Goblin Mode"

In addition to superb marketing methods, goblintown caters to the current The "Goblin Mode" meme culture in the context of the raging epidemic has aroused everyone's sympathy.

"Goblin mode" refers to a person who is generally messy due to laziness or aversion to going out, may not have a bath and behaves "savagely", the term has also been widely interpreted as a way to describe sloppy , unkempt and lazy man's way. It's been used for years on sites like Tumblr and Urban Dictionary. And this model has a new scenario in the current epidemic environment: people are forced to stay at home, hardly get out of bed, don't change into new clothes, eat fast food without cooking, and indulge in social media every day middle.

"Goblin Mode" has no aesthetic feeling at all, or rather, it is ugly. After all, who cares what a goblin looks like?

The famous art critic Stephen Bayley said in "Appreciation of Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything": "The more you think about ugliness and the longer you look at it, the more treacherous and changeable the concept of ugliness becomes. Uncertain."

Reflecting the "Goblin mode" to the works of goblintown, everyone's first impression of goblintown is almost "ugly" and " Disgusting", even so, it still captured a large number of followers with its unique culture, it seems "not ugly".

Goblin "culture"

goblintown uses words and sentences similar to "GGG". This style is popular in the entire NFT circle Unique. Someone found that the official tweet of Bud Light's best-selling beer series even uses "Goblin language". One of the Ads for .

In order to better use "Goblintown" to participate in Goblin Online Discussion, and some people even spontaneously organized a "Goblin Speaking Class". In addition, everyone has made a lot of meme expression packs to spread the community culture of goblintown.

Easter eggs!

go blintown is on sale In the series, besides Goblin, there are 5 Easter egg NFTs. At the same time, goblintown officially announced and promoted it on May 21 and May 23, and revealed the information: "This egg is very special. "Watching it gradually break open and reveal an eye, everyone was very curious about what the egg would look like. The goblintown team once again gave everyone an unimaginable progress: they smashed the egg to pieces.

The goblintown team did not follow common sense, which once again aroused everyone's curiosity. Currently, this easter egg is sold on OpenSea at a minimum price of 77.77ETH.

Meanwhile, on their official website, the goblintown team photo frame It will also change. The goblin images of the team members appear in turn every day, which can be said to whet the appetite.

After all, how could a cunning goblin let you guess its thoughts?

Answer?

The famous Italian literary critic Benedetto Croce said: "Ugliness is a sign of failure."

Although goblintown was launched with an "ugly to the extreme" artistic image, its price has skyrocketed from the initial free casting in less than a week. "When it reaches a maximum of more than 2ETH, its marketing methods, community spontaneous meme culture, and performance in the secondary market can be said to be very successful.

The story of goblintown is still going on. Crumbs", looking forward to it revealing the answers one by one.

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