Up until now, much of the NFT space has concerned itself primarily with art, pictures, jpegs and galleries. Orbs are different. Orbs are usable 1-of-1 NFTs that belong in inventories, not in galleries. They are for usage, not display. Conceptually, an Orb is a precious item that belongs in your magic item bag. Technically, the Orb is a modified ERC-721 on Ethereum that manages ownership functions through auctions and a Harberger tax system.
Different Orbs have different functions. Eric’s Orb is a basic Q&A-type Orb. The holder has the right to submit a text-based question to Eric and the right to receive a text-based response. The question is limited to 280 characters but responses may come in any length. Questions and answers are hash-committed to the Ethereum blockchain so that the track record how the issuer responds cannot be changed. The Orb has a 1-week cooldown.
I’ve had a vision for a direction that I think NFTs should go in, the “next step for NFTs”, going beyond simple pictures. I originally invented the Orb idea in 2021 and tried to get others motivated to create something along these lines.
“Social tokens” is a web3 holy grail, but no one has been successful at creating a version of them that creators actually want to issue and users want to own. After failed experiments like Bitclout, interest waned off. It shouldn’t have! I believe there is a right way to do them and a wrong way to do them. It’s been frustrating to see that there hasn’t been much progress.
The beauty of the Orb concept is that it’s just so simple. It just has one owner at a time, which makes it easy for the issuer to deliver some type of value that they can stand by without having to make sacrifices on other things in their life.
In the case of Eric’s Orb, the Orb is for anyone who wants to own the right to ask Eric questions on a recurring basis and the right to resell that right to someone else. It can be a fan, a friend who always gets left on read, my mother. If I had to guess, I’d imagine it is going to be challenging for people to outbid cryptocurrency funds, startups or DAOs that see this as an opportunity to get a second opinion about their investments and strategy.
A cooldown is how long you must wait after using the Orb before you can use it again. Eric’s Orb has a 1-week cooldown.
Eric’s Orb can be used once a week for 10 years (April 17, 2033) unless Eric dies or becomes physically incapable of responding.
To put it bluntly, nothing. However:
One of the the few widely acknowledged non-buzzword use cases for a blockchains is that it’s an untamperable proof-of-publication system (a timestamp service). For the Orb to register Eric’s responses, Eric must submit a hashed commit of his response for every question to the Orb smart contract. Any failure to comply (no-show) will get immutably recorded on the blockchain forever.
It should be very embarrassing for Eric to not honor his word. In the crypto space, founders can always blame a million different things when something goes wrong. But if you fail to honor the promise of something as simple as an Orb, what excuse could you possibly use? What is your word worth if you can’t even honor your own Orb? It’ll be the easiest way to identify that someone is not to be trusted.
That said, there is also the loss of future revenue. It is realistic to assume that if the Orb’s promise isn’t honored, Eric loses his ability to collect the Harberger tax revenue from the Orb as well as royalties from future sales, as the Orb’s value proposition has been ruined.