As if the NFT tendency wasn’t already incomprehensible and irritating enough. For some reason, investors are suddenly buying up exclusive rights to basic strings of emojis. According to The Wall Street Journal, early adopters are now referring to the consecutive row of cartoonized images as “Yats,” indicating that we’re still far from reaching peak NFT. Alternatively, yat.
“It says a lot about someone if their yat is Fire-Dragon,” Yat Labs co-founder Naveen Jain told the publication. “In contrast, your username is Naveen512. That’ll tell you what my area code is.” In other words, strings of emojis are the latest and best in NFTs – if you really want to go down that route.
Yats can range in price from pennies to thousands of dollars. Of course, Jain has already reaped the benefits of the trend, earning $20 million from the sale of about 160,000 Yats since February, according to the Journal. Needless to say, high-profile celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Lil Wayne have already jumped on the bandwagon.
For investors, it’s just another method to build an internet presence — and, well, spend a lot of money. “This is all a fantasy created in our thoughts, but all property is a fiction created in our heads,” Yat Labs investor Michael Arrington told the Wall Street Journal.
Yats, on the other hand, does not impress everyone. “I might argue this NFT signifies a series of initials or my butt.” It would have the same impact as turning a Yat into an NFT, according to David Gerard, author of “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.”
You may now invest in the heart-eyes emoji like you would a gold bar. With nonfungible tokens gaining traction in the art, sports, and music spheres, some investors are betting on the value of unique strings of emojis as digital assets—for example, successive photos of a surfer, palm tree, and thumbs-up.
Artificial intelligence-generated graphics have always been disturbing, but one artist’s neural network-guided interpretation of BuzzFeed headlines takes it to another level. It appears that these extraterrestrial visuals generated by generative artist Somnai, whose real name is Max Ingham, were motivated by an interaction with Max Woolf, a BuzzFeed data scientist.
Woolf joked that he had a “legit need” to investigate how effectively the relatively new neural network Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (better known as CLIP) would handle BuzzFeed’s notably memeable headlines while quote-tweeting some of the artist’s “needlepoint” work. “That’s a good concept,” Ingham said. “I’m going to load some up right now.”
