What is Goblin Town?

Irreverent NFT collection Goblin Town has come from nowhere to command a floor price of just over 0.5 ETH. It’s done this without hype, a roadmap or a huge following, while the NFTs were distributed for free. All they have is a Twitter account with 10,600 followers, and counting.

• The collection is called Goblintown.wtf on OPENSEA and the floor prices of the free-to-mint NFTs currently sits around the 0.5 ETH mark.
• The team behind the project has inverted the usual methods of community-building, marketing, collaborating, whitelisting and creating hype for a mint.
• The project launched on May 22nd without fanfare and the mint was free for whoever happened to have heard about the NFTs.
• With seemingly very little effort put into the launch, anything more than complete failure is a success. Ultimately, with nothing to lose, Goblin Town has everything to gain.

Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Goblin Town is a 10,000-strong collection of generative NFTs that launched on May 22nd. A Twitter profile for the project was set up only this month and the team behind the collection has made a point of not revealing itself.

There is no roadmap with details about where the project is headed and there is no Discord where the team can communicate with its community. Finally, the Goblin Town developers stated explicitly that there is no utility attached to the NFTs.

What is Goblin Town?

By design, we don’t know a huge amount about Goblin Town. The collection seems to have come from nowhere and has not been heavily marketed to the NFT community. Despite this, trading volume for the NFTs on OpenSea is already over 3,800 ETH (over $7.76 million at the time of writing).

The Goblin Town NFT collection has entered at number two on DappRadar’s NFT rankings pages. For the past 24 hours alone, the non-fungible tokens have generated $4.14 million in sales. Even so, people on Twitter still don’t know where the collection originated from. But this hasn’t stopped the internet from being impressed at a brand new project’s ability to make something out of nearly nothing. 

One thing we know about Goblin Town is that it wasn’t built by goblins. The team’s scant messaging states as much on their website. But aside from this small nugget of non-information, all we know about the people behind the NFTs is that they’re irreverent and have spotted a gap in the market.

They’ve come up with an effective way of standing out in an industry whose users claim to appreciate solid smart contracts, clear roadmaps, a team that communicates clearly and valuable utilities. What we’re seeing is that people crave novelty. They want to associate themselves with a brand new NFT concept because this will, in turn, make the holder of the NFT stand out.

What are Goblin Town’s plans?

It seems the short-term goal is to troll everyone who thinks Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, Moonbirds, Clone X and Invisible Friends are serious collections. Upending preconceptions about “blue chip” NFTs seems to be Goblin Town’s method for differentiating itself from the sometimes smug projects that trade on their own exclusivity.

Looking at the Goblin Town website, it’s obviously creative and despite the seeming lack of care, a lot of thought has clearly gone into it. But the anonymous team behind the project hasn’t spent its time building up a loyal fanbase and a strong community. And the NFTs were minted for free so there’s nothing to undercut by bricking the floor price.

In a way, Goblin Town is the anti-NFT project. It’s the punk rock of web3 and its quick success is a testament to its originality. If this popularity continues, expect a slew of copycat projects that feign indifference and attempt to make a virtue out of apathy.

DappRadar will be keeping an eye on this project as it unfolds so stay tuned to our blog to see what happens. And follow us on Twitter to get the quickest news as it happens. Use our NFT pages to see how Goblin Town moves up and down as the week goes on. There’s a good chance that we’ll be discussing the collection on this week’s Off The Blockchain podcast, which airs every Thursday at 4pm.