The NFT market was dead, until it wasn’t. Along came the wildest burger eating, floor peeing, monkey hating, egg smashing community in the history of NFT’s. In 6 short days Goblintown went from a free mint to the absolute loudest community in the history of NFT’s. The moment I knew I was witnessing something special was when I went into a Twitter Space titled “aaaaauuuuuggghhhh” which ended up being 3 and a half hours of grunts, shrieks, and pendulum chants. Going from a literal 0 ETH floor to 2 ETH in a couple days is unheard of and unprecedented. This wasn’t dumb luck. They took the existing, tired NFT formula and completely flipped it on its head. Let’s walk through how they did it so next time another project comes along that is showing these early signs you know when to pounce.
Free mint, no Discord, no roadmap, no utility, no visible leader. A blueprint 99% of NFT projects would never consider using. Yet this is exactly the path the Goblins decided to go with. This blueprint built an incredibly strong, loud, obnoxious, Twitter rattling community in under 24 hours. In the middle of the most violent bear market in NFT history, the Goblins decided to go with a free mint, an incredibly smart decision. Instead of trying to make money up front they decided to bet on themselves. People minted the project with no expectation to flip. I’ve seen several projects mint over the last few weeks with a high price that immediately tanked. It led to FUD that destroyed the community and doomed the project right away. Flippers were way louder than the holders. By doing a free mint, expectations were 0 so the people in the project had no reason to do anything but stay strong. On top of that, by attracting tens of thousands of people to the website to try to get the free mint they were met with a culture building experience. The website, soundtracked by a perfectly bizarre, hypnotic marching tune, immediately set the tone on what the project was all about. On the screen you were met with a text message conversation between 2 goblins speaking in borderline nonsense. The website showed you exactly what this project was about: creating strange chaos.
Discord has become the de facto communication platform for all projects. Sometimes I wonder what the NFT space would be like without it. Goblintown proves it wouldn’t be all bad. Another trend the Goblins bucked is Discord. The Goblins have no communication platform at all other than the Twitter accounts of holders. I think this served the project well for several reasons. First, there was no venue to complain to creators or other holders about how no utility was being delivered. Stay in any NFT Discord long enough and you’ll eventually see people complaining about how they haven’t made money and how the creators are too slow. This destroys communities from within. By not having a Discord it’s almost as if Goblintown became decentralized. Chaotic decentralization that is perfect for the tone of this project. Holders were driven to Twitter where their goblin PFP’s and nonsensical gibberish tweets became advertisements for the project.
No roadmap, no utility, and no visible project creators led to absolutely no expectations for the project. No expectations combined with the free mint led to holders having absolutely no reason to do anything other than create noise. And create noise they did. Over the last several days Goblins have started hosting Twitter Spaces that have now become infamous in the NFT community. Stages filled with bizarre green monsters grunting, farting, chanting, and threatening any monkeys and humans that came on stage. These twisted spaces have attracted thousands who have sat in and listened to the nonsense for hours on end. Sitting in on these spaces lead to an odd sense of FOMO that’s hard to describe. It makes you want to spend thousands of dollars just to have the monster PFP so you can join in on the chanting and farting. Another form of super powerful organic advertising that the Goblins have weaponized on social media.
I’ve talked about this in past posts but building your own language is one of the most potent ways of building a community. As Elon Musk once said “Those who control the memes control the world.” At the moment the Goblins definitely control the memes. This kind of unique language and culture is almost impossible to build, and they’ve done it in under a week. It causes those on the inside to want to stay on the inside, and those on the outside feel intense amounts of FOMO. In a market that is filled with so much intense negativity at the moment it’s incredible how Goblintown was able to build this culture organically so fast. While something this organic will be incredibly difficult to ever recreate, the decisions made by Goblintown should be studied by every project creator. Instead of trying to fit in and grab as much cash as possible, they build their blueprint for the current environment we’re in. It’s hard to say where the project evolves from here, but one thing is for sure, thousands of derivatives will come, the Spaces will remain wildly entertaining, and monkeys will be turnt into burgers with Gary P sauce. Long live the Goblins.
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