Developers said that in Web3, your Yat will become a universal digital identifier and can also be used as a URL, wallet address and may be minted on the Ethereum blockchain as a nonfungible token (NFT). Will emojis be the Web3 version of a username? That is what Yat, a Nashville-based tech startup thinks and with 160,000 sold worth a cumulative $20 million, it appears like many people already agree with this notion.
A Yat is described as a string of one to five emojis that can be used as a digital username, website URL, and as a payment address for the user’s digital wallet. It appears to be a cross between a nonfungible token (NFT) and a domain address, although not all Yats are tokenized.
The firm wrote in its Discord server:
“Yat lets you use emojis as your universal username and identity on the internet. Imagine being known as fire-snake or robot-ghost-crown instead of coffeequeen98 or jake2456@emailxyz.com. By owning a Yat — let’s say ocean-trident-palm tree — it’s yours forever. You are the ~only~ one on earth who owns these emojis.”
Notably, it might also be a decentralized alternative to the current Domain Name System (DNS) that is administered by the internet regulator ICANN. DNS utilizes a centralized, hierarchical system to organize and help users find different things on the internet.
Yat owners have had the chance to tokenize their string of emojis as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for extra costs since July 2021, but acquiring a Yat is not the same as minting an NFT. Owners need to use Yat’s “visualizer tool” to develop a short animation of the emoji string to turn the Yat into an NFT.
The visualization is then integrated with the Yat itself and can be minted as an NFT to be sold or held on OpenSea.
👻🐝👑@whatsyouryat pic.twitter.com/EPGLYDmYmW
— AshleyDCanᵍᵐⓣ (@AshleyDCan) February 8, 2022
A 1-5 character design can cost between $4 and hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy initially, and additional fees to turn it into an NFT. The shorter and more memorable the combination, the higher the price of the product.
Notably, the most expensive product was the one character of a golden key that cost $425,000 at the Yat Destiny auction in mid-2021. At the time of publication, Yat has a trading volume of 410 ETH ($1,258,622) on Opensea.
The project already has many notable celebrity investors like Lil Wayne (alien-music note), Paris Hilton (queen crown-sparkle), and Kesha (rainbow-rocket ship-alien).
Nevertheless, the project has also faced a fair share of challenges. Some of them include the mundane criticisms that Yat URLs can be challenging to find since it is not always easy to type an emoji sequence on a standard QWERTY keyboard.
On the more dramatic side of the spectrum, Yat co-founder and ex-CEO Riccardo Spagnia “Fluffypony” was arrested in the United States in August 2021, where he waited for extradition to South Africa for many fraud charges. These fraud charges were unrelated to Yat. This project was unveiled in February 2021 and has since grown to a team of around 55.
