Truth Labs, the creator of the once-hit NFT collection Goblintown, has announced the impending launch of a new NFT collection: “BiG iNC.” And this set come with a special twist. The team will reserve the 1,000 NFTs in the private sale for the equivalent number of worst traders in the non-fungible token space.
To do so, Truth Labs has set up a “Down Bad Board” where users can see their ranking among NFT traders — and whether they are bad enough to qualify for the mint. Those who think they do can submit an application that the company will review to determine if presale access should be granted. Truth Labs says on its website that it makes sure wash trades — where an individual trades among different wallets for a variety of purposes — are excluded.
In addition to the 1,000 worst traders in the NFT space, the mint will also be open to holders of various Truth Labs NFT collections, including Goblintown, Grumpl, Illuminati, Believer Pass, and Those Who Remain. Dune Analytics, a Web3 statistics website, shows that there are over 9,600 wallet addresses who hold a Truth Labs NFT.
The NFT creator is pre-rejecting all influencers and says there will only ever be 15,000 positions available in BiG iNC, indicating that this could be one of the bigger drops during the NFT bear market.
According to Tweets from Truth Labs, interested NFT enthusiasts will need to follow four steps:
- Fill out a questionnaire
- Check your ranking on the Down Bad Board
- [Redacted by the company]
- Mint your BiG iNC acceptance letter in the 24-hour window
Mint price will be 0.096 ETH (around $179 at this time of writing) or 50% off if the minter uses $PEPE, a meme coin that has soared into the top 100 cryptos traded after just launching in mid-April of 2023. Truth Labs is one of the first companies to use $PEPE during an NFT mint, adding utility to the meme frog coin.
Goblintown Metadata Change Provokes Backlash
When non-fungible tokens first rose in popularity throughout 2021, observers hailed them as a way for creators and artists to collect royalties in perpetuity. However, that changed in 2022 as marketplaces stopped enforcing royalties to gain market share.
Truth Labs, which launched its top collection Goblintown as a free mint (meaning it could only gain money from royalties), did not appreciate that, so much so that it took an extreme step: changing the metadata for its collections so that the art was no longer the pictures customers initially bought but an animated middle finger.
Along with that animation came a few sentences of colorful language expressing that Web3 didn’t care about its builders, creatives, or community — just flipping. The team closed the statement with “Long live the slow rug.”
While many thought the placement of the art in the metadata was a potential weakness of NFT technology (minting the actual art images onto the blockchain is usually too costly for projects), not many expected such a dramatic move, and from a collection that had been among the top in the bear market at that. The move provoked some backlash in the NFT space.
Since then, Truth Labs has airdropped new tokens for holders with the original art and updated the smart contracts in those collections to enforce royalties — a change marketplaces say they will abide by.
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