Anything can happen in Web3. In fact, one of the most attractive aspects of the crypto and NFT space is its Wild West-esque nature; play your cards right, and you could stumble upon generational wealth in a way nowhere else can. And while scams, frauds, and ruin are certainly among the seemingly endless possibilities the space has to offer, it’s important to remember that so are innovation and even altruism.
One of the more encouraging stories Web3 has seen in recent days is the rise of $TURBO, a meme cryptocurrency created by artist Rhett Dashwood (AKA Mankind) as both an experiment and a piece of performance art. Mankind is a Sotheby’s-selling OG crypto artist whose work often depicts ethereal and otherworldly scenes and figures overlaid in saturated color.
The gimmick behind the token’s rise? Mankind created the coin on a budget of $69 and the help of ChatGPT – and with no significant coding or coin making experience to speak of.
You could say that his experiment has been a success. $TURBO currently has a market cap of $50 million and has generated over $26 million in volume in the last 24 hours alone. Here’s how he did it.
Start at the beginning
“I gave ChatGPT-4 a budget of $69 and asked it to make the next great meme coin,” read Mankind’s Tweet from April 23. The simple premise was the product of humanity’s reflection on the current state of the crypto art space.
“I’ve been into crypto art for a number of years and this year was absolutely dead because I was trying to sell digital art,” Mankind said in a recent YouTube video describing why he started the project. He’s not wrong. NFT sales volumes are at a 20-month low and the entire Web3 ecosystem is feeling the weight of a crypto winter that no one can see ending.
Mankind says he thought it was the perfect time to play around with some of the AI tools he’d been exploring lately, with ChatGPT leading the way. Perhaps, he thought, he could draw people’s attention to his artwork through an experiment.
The first thing ChatGPT asked him to do was work out the concept. This included coming up with a name for the coin, a catchy backstory, and a logo. Humanity then asked ChatGPT to help further come up with a name or come up with other ideas.
As part of the experiment, he encouraged his Twitter followers to help him through the decision-making process. Giving them four options from GPT’s suggested list of ten meme coin names – HypeHound, AstroCorgi, FomoFeline, and TurboToad – his followers overwhelmingly chose TurboToad as the way to go.
After coming up with a name for the coin’s mascot, a character named Quantum Leap, Mankind Mid-journey used to help him make the logo. Again, he polled his followers to choose the mascot image and settled on a cute, Pixar-esque image of a yellow-orange toad character wearing a spacesuit.
Code big or code house
At this point in the experiment, humanity ran into a hurdle. ChatGPT’s capabilities are limited, as the program will be trained on data until September 2021, with no access to developments beyond that. This led the artist to consider how the lack of access to trends in the coin economy after that point might affect the type of information he was getting from the AI. After the new and updated context was fed back into ChatGPT, the AI gave him new information and advised him to write the code for the project. The only problem was that he had no idea how to code.
“This was probably the first stumbling block,” Mankind said of his experience. It was problematic because the AI had told him to start learning to code, something he didn’t have the time or inclination to do. So humanity’s natural next question was, “Can you help me with the Solidity coding?” After hours of back and forth with humanity and the AI co-creating and verifying the code, the artist succeeded.
By the end of the first day of the experiment, Humanity had evolved the concept of the coin, the tokenomics, the white paper and had written 75 percent of the smart contract.
“I loved that. In one day, to be able to get this far.” said humanity.
His next step was to have the code checked. After ask his followers if someone could check the code for him, a few people volunteered to give him some advice, which he then fed back to GPT to optimize the code. By the end of day two of his experiment, humanity had finalized the smart contract for the coin and started building the project’s website and social channels.
After a botched launch of TurboToad with bots rushing in and ruining the experiment by claiming most of the liquidity pool, knocking the price out of proportion and preventing it from adding more liquidity to the project, Mankind decided that this was the end was off the line. He had sunk around $600 by that point (well beyond the $69 budget he started with) and didn’t have the money to try again.
Fortunately, his community came to the rescue. After questioning them about what to do next, his followers told them to find a new way forward. With the help of ChatGPT, Mankind decided to crowdfund, promising the contributors that they would be fairly rewarded with the token for anything they contributed to help fund the project. After choosing a new name for the token, turbo ($TURBO)he decided that the total supply would be 69 billion tokens, with 60 billion set aside for the community and the rest for himself as the main contributor.
The community voted for a way forward. Here it is! https://t.co/XE798VTRtw
— Rhett Humanity (@rhett) April 26, 2023
Turbo, take two
At this point in the experiment, humanity felt that the project was beyond them. He did not own the majority share of the token and had encouraged his followers to take the project in the desired direction, whether that was starting a Telegram channel or creating a Discord for the coin.
They did just that, and that’s when the meme coin started gaining attention of artists Mankind noticed how innovative the experiment was and polled his followers to see what they wanted to do with the project next. Their response was to increase liquidity. As $TURBO continued to gain momentum, it received a major boost from well-known Web3 collector Pranksy, who created a V3 liquidity poolsolving the problem that the community had voted for shortly before.
In the first 48 hours after the launch of the new version of $TURBO, the coin reached a market cap of $1 million, something far beyond what humanity had expected to happen for the project. Now the token is spreading like wildfire through the Twitterverse, with some of the most notable commentators And influencers praising humanity for the idea and its success.
As the tidal wave continues, humanity has set its sights on decentralizing the project and questioning its followers as to whether or not it is right to relinquishing property of the project’s smart contract, making it inaccessible. While the poll has yet to be finalized, so far a majority of followers have signaled that it’s time to do so.
Unexpected innovation, unexpected good
The NFT space has a well-deserved reputation for fraud and shady actors, but $TURBO’s story reminds Web3’s critics and supporters of its ability to do good, too. As $TURBO continues to rise, humanity’s experiment has long since passed the point where it can be described as a success. While claims from holders in the project Discord that they can pay off home loans thanks to the meme coin have yet to be substantiated, there is no doubt that it changes things for the better for the creator.
“The thought of my daughter looking up to me and seeing that something I’ve done is successful; that was great too,” Mankind said in his recent video. “So many things have come out of this that it is overwhelming because it has already taken on a life of its own that is way beyond me. Just to know that I’ve accelerated something that could take on a life of its own is very special.