Once heralded as proof that Ethereum NFTs have utilities beyond speculative trading, Eric Wall is shutting down his Orb Land project. The project has been dormant for over a month.
Orbs would be “NFTs with actual utility,” Wall said. In reality, almost no one used his sophistic proof-of-concept.
On April 10, 2023, Wall created his sphere. It has now been discontinued. “Thank you to everyone who participated,” he signed cheerfully.
The entire project has spawned just five orbs by crypto celebrities Wall, Nic Carter, Justin Drake, Tarun Chitra, and Zaki Manian. Even their combined number of followers of 714,000 on X couldn’t attract more orb thinkers.
Wall co-founded Orb Land together with Jonas Lekevicius of cybersecurity company Cube3. Lekevicius never owned an orb, but helped code smart contracts, create the website, and manage designs.
No one cares about non-speculative utility NFTs
Comically, the project disproved the exact concept it set out to prove. Not only did it fail to prove that Ethereum NFTs have a non-speculative use, but it also failed to prove a modern use case for the Harberger Tax.
A Harberger tax is a user-specified tax rate that is assessed while the user owns an asset. Orb holders specified a price at which they were willing to sell, and Orb Land would deduct a percentage of that amount until they sold the orb. Orbs Every 12 seconds, ETH was withdrawn from orb holders’ wallets (any Ethereum block).
Orb Land promoters like Wall and Nic Carter spoke at length about the innovative Harberger Tax in a wide variety of media interviews. They praised the innovative compensation structure to “auction a recurring portion of your time.” They promised that orb calls – written responses to questions from orb holders that Orb Land ceremoniously hashed onto Ethereum’s blockchain – were merely a proof-of-concept for a plethora of motivating use cases for non-speculative, useful NFTs.
In the end, no one cared. Carter complained that owning an orb burdened him with “homework” that he unfortunately typed to unwanted callers.
Today, from the inception of Ethereum’s ERC-721 ‘NFT’ standard, the primary use of NFTs is still not utility, but speculate on their sales price.
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Like most crypto projects, Wall’s blockchain project remained centralized. Even Wall himself admitted that there is little reason why Orb Land couldn’t simply be a non-crypto website.
No one could ever own an Orb Land orb without applying to control it. Orbs also have no transfer function, so management unilaterally enforced royalty rates and collections.
Orb Land was a simple company that had little connection to the product market and is now going bankrupt. It failed to prove that NFTs have a non-speculative utility beyond niche hobbyists and wealthy celebrity fans.