TL;DR
If a staunch altcoin and NFT skeptic like Lyn Alden admits that an NFT project ‘might not suck’, I’m paying extra attention. Orb Land is not your average monkey picture project but instead more like a tradable VIP ticket. Let’s dive in.
As a holder of a traditional VIP ticket, you get backstage access to a celebrity. The NFT version called Orb Land is like an online, on-chain version of this. An Orb is an NFT that represents an individual’s time, such as that of an analyst or an expert in a specific field.
Orb Creators and Keepers
Every Orb is a distinct, personalized NFT, built on Ethereum and linked to the creator for a predetermined contract duration. This gives the Orb holder (called ‘Keeper’, the present owner of the NFT) the privilege to consult the Orb creator based on the terms set out in the contract.
The Origin
Orb Land is a project of Eric Wall, one of Bitcoin’s ‘Taproot Wizards’. The project launched in June 2023 and some of Wall’s entourage of builders and analysts quickly joined. Wall thinks Orb Land could become a good business model for ‘crypto consultants’, who could sustain themselves by answering one question each week with their own Orb.
Orb Land’s tagline is:
tradable access to leading thinkers
Indeed, the core idea of Orb is that an NFT gives access to personal consulting services, effectively tokenizing an expert’s time and expertise.
An Example: Nic Carter’s Orb
Nic Carter is a leading crypto analyst and VC partner. He is one of the thought leaders in Wall’s circle who has engaged with Orb Land. Meaning, you can buy and keep his Orb and do ‘invocations’ aka ask him questions.
First, you connect your crypto wallet with Orb.land. Anyone is free to simply buy the Orb from the current Keeper, as long as they’re happy to cough up, in this case 5 ETH.
As you can see in Nic’s Orb screenshot (above) there is an ownership tax associated with the Orb. That’s a steep 150% per year, meaning that you will pay 7.5 ETH per year to keep it in your possession.
Then what? If you purchase his Orb (5 ETH), you can ask Nic one question a week, or, as Orb Land calls it: ‘Invoke his Orb’. You can keep his answer for yourself, as the below owner did.
But the Keeper of the Orb can also opt to open Nic’s answer to his question to the world. That’s what the next owner of the Orb did. (We can tell he bought the Orb from the previous owner, whose address ended with the …97F.)
This new Keeper posed on September 3d 2023 a question to Nic about a US dollar-backed stablecoin. Nic’s answer is public (see below).
In other question/answer pairs, Nic Carter has provided detailed, 1500+ word assessments of the solvency risks of specific exchanges or stablecoin issuers (Carter gave Circle a 95% of safely custodying all customer assets for the next 4 years. He gave Tether a 60% chance).
Different Orbs have different functions and different settings. For example, Tarun Chitra‘s Orb is a basic Q&A-type Orb, like Nic Carter’s. But he chose his settings differently. People can ask him a question every 10 days. The current price is also much lower.
The ‘Tokenomics’ of Orbs: High Taxes
- Who buys the Orb can set the price that the next Keeper will have to pay to him.
- The higher a Keeper sets the price, the higher they tax themselves while they…
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
