NFTs
Orb Land’s shutdown proves that almost no one cares about NFT utility
Once heralded as proof that Ethereum NFTs have uses beyond speculative trading, Eric Wall is shutting down his Orb Land project. The project has been dormant for over a year. month.
Orbs should be ‘NFTs with real utility’ according to to Wall. In reality, almost no one used his sophisticated proof of concept.
On April 10, 2023, Wall created your orb. Now it is interrupted. “Thank you to everyone who participated,” he said with ease.
The entire project only generated five orbs from crypto celebrities Wall, Nic Carter, Justin Drake, Tarun Chitra and Zaki Manian. Even their combined follower count of 714,000 in X failed to attract more orb weighters.
Wall co-founded Orb Land with Jonas Lekevicius of cybersecurity firm Cube3. Lekevicius never owned an Orb, but he helped code smart contracts, build the website, and manage designs.
It’s funny that Orb Land (also called “the worst NFT project in history”) is getting attention on this blessed day
The reason this is funny is because, unfortunately, we are *just* about to undo this passion project of mine (and my co-founder’s) @lekevicius!)
Let me… photo.twitter.com/u9ogkRf7gM
— Eric Wall | BIP-420😺 (@ercwl) May 21, 2024
Eric Wall writes the final chapter of a story with the opposite ending to what he intended.
Nobody cares about non-speculative utility NFTs
Comically, the project disproved the exact concept it set out to prove. Not only did it fail to prove that Ethereum NFTs have non-speculative utility, but it also failed to prove a modern use case for the Harberger Tax.
A Harberger tax is a user-specified tax rate that is assessed while the user holds an asset. Orb holders would specify a price they were willing to sell for, then Orb Land would drain a percentage of that value until they sold the orb. Orbs drained ETH from orb holders’ wallets every 12 seconds (each Ethereum block).
Orb Land promoters like Wall and Nic Carter have talked about the groundbreaking Harberger Tax at length in a wide variety of media interviews. They touted its innovative fee structure for “auctioning off a recurring slice of your time.” They promised that orb invocations—written answers to orb holders’ questions that Orb Land ceremonially hashes onto the Ethereum blockchain—were just a proof of concept for a cornucopia of motivating use cases for useful, non-speculative NFTs.
Ultimately, no one cared. Carter complained that owning an orb burdened him with “homework” that he regrettably typed for unwanted summoners.
Today, since the inception of Ethereum’s ERC-721 ‘NFT’ standard, the primary use of NFTs remains not utility, but speculating on its resale price.
Read more: Influencer bypassed Logan Paul’s NFT lawsuit to ‘save six figures’
Like most crypto projects, Wall’s blockchain project has remained centralized. Even Wall himself admitted that there is little reason why Orb Land could not simply be a non-crypto site.
In fact, no one could possess an orb from Orb Land without applying for management. Orbs also have no transfer function, so management unilaterally royalty rates and charges applied.
Orb Land was a simple business that gained little product-market fit and is now closing. failed to prove that NFTs have non-speculative utility as well as niche hobbyists and wealthy celebrity fans.
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