The Yat is an emoji that costs $425000.According to the designers, your Yat will not only be a global digital identify in Web3, but it will also be a URL, wallet address, and an NFT minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Yat, a Nashville-based tech firm, feels that, and with 160,000 units sold for a total of $20 million, it appears that many regular people believe.
“Yat allows you to utilize emoticons as your internet username and identity,” the startup posted on its Discord server.
A Yat is a string of one to five emojis that may be used as your digital username, website URL, and digital wallet payment address. Although not all Yats are tokenized, it’s a hybrid between a Non-fungible token (NFT) and a domain address.
Since July 2021, Yat owners have had the option to tokenize their string of emojis as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for a fee, but buying a Yat isn’t the same as minting an NFT.
Owners must first use Yat’s “visualizer tool” to produce a short animation of the emoji string before turning the Yat into an NFT. The visualization is then linked to the Yat, and it may be minted as an NFT on OpenSea to be held or traded.
Buying a one- to five-character design can cost anything from $4 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus additional expenses to make it into an NFT. The higher the price, the shorter and more memorable the combo.
The endeavor, however, has not been without its difficulties. They include the commonplace, such as complaints that Yat URLs are difficult to discover because typing an emoji sequence on a regular QWERTY keypad isn’t always straightforward.
On the other hand, Yat co-founder and former CEO Riccardo Spagnia “Fluffypony” was detained in the United States in August 2021, where he awaited extradition to South Africa on charges of fraud. Yat has nothing to do with the fraud charges. Yat was founded in February 2021 and now employs 55 people.
At the Yat Destiny auction in mid-2021, the most expensive Yat was the single character of a golden key, which sold for $425,000. On Opensea, Yat has a trading volume of 410 ETH ($1,258,622 USD) at the time of writing.
Paris Hilton (queen crown-sparkle), Lil Wayne (alien-music note), and Kesha are among the noteworthy celebrity investors in Yat (rainbow-rocket ship-alien).
