What is a Yat and why are people paying $425K for emojis?
Will emojis become the Web3 version of a username? That’s what Nashville-based tech startup Yat believes and with 160,000 sold worth a combined $20 million, it seems plenty of ordinary people agree.
A Yat is a string of between one and five emojis that can be used as your digital username, website URL and as a payment address for your digital wallet. It’s sort of a cross between a nonfungible token (NFT) and domain address — though not all Yats are tokenized.
“Yat lets you use emojis as your universal username and identity on the internet,” the company wrote in its Discord server.
Theoretically, Yat could be a decentralized alternative to the current Domain Name System (DNS), which is administered by the internet regulator ICANN. DNS uses a centralized, hierarchical system to organize and help users find things on the internet.
Yat owners have had the option to tokenize their string of emojis as a NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for an additional cost since July 2021, but purchasing a Yat isn’t actually the same as minting a NFT.
To turn the Yat into an NFT, owners must first use Yat’s “visualizer tool” to create a short animation of the emoji string. The visualization is then tied to the Yat itself and can be minted as an NFT to be held or sold on OpenSea.
@whatsyouryat pic.twitter.com/EPGLYDmYmW
A one- to five-character design can cost anywhere from $4 to hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase initially, plus additional fees to turn it into a NFT. The shorter and more memorable the combination, the higher the price.
The most expensive Yat was the single character of a golden key, which went for $425,000 at the Yat Destiny auction in mid-2021. At the time of writing, Yat has a trading volume of 410 ETH ($1,258,622
Read more on cointelegraph.com
