I love success stories like this. It’s what makes Web3 and the NFT community so powerful and endearing.
This story came across our desks this week and we found the experiment not only clever and fascinating but also a perfect microcosm and snapshot of our times.
If you haven’t seen the moving 37-minute video, check it out. The artist Rhett Mankind of Australia — a well-known pioneering crypto artist in the space — explains step by step how he enlisted Chat GPT4 to help him with a little experiment that turned out extraordinarily well for its early supporters. (Rhett was one of the artists I looked up to when I first started exploring the NFT space in January 2020.)
Rhett, who acknowledges up front he’s an artist, not a programmer or tokenomics expert, used Chat GPT to help develop the concept, develop the tokenomics, create a whitepaper, develop a smart contract and more.
The mascot of $TURBO, the new community memecoin.
On day 3, he encountered a roadblock when he tried to create a liquidity pool with almost no funds to deploy the coin. A bot swooped in and acquired the entire liquidity pool at a very cheap price, drying up the liquidity. But the next day, someone stepped up an created a new liquidity pool. So Rhett reworked the steps, allocated a release of 69 billion tokens — with 9 billion going to him and 60 billion to the community — and crowdfunded the launch. Some 50 people sent in Eth, ranging from $1 to $300 (USD or Australian dollar).
Thus was born the $TURBO token, which even has a cute little frog critter as its mascot. The token rose to $25 million in value while Rhett was filming the video. He gets emotional at the 23-minute mark talking about his family’s economic situation, and again toward the end.
Fortune online wrote about it reaching a $77 million market cap. As of today, it’s at $50 million.
Crazy. Crazy genius.