The floor price for the Slonks NFT collection has increased by 60 times in the six days since its launch, reaching 0.123 ETH on the Ethereum blockchain. The project, which uses an AI model to reinterpret CryptoPunks, has seen 586 ETH in trading volume on OpenSea in its first week, according to data from the platform.
The project’s value proposition is based on AI imperfections, which the creator calls “slop.” “The slop is not a bug. It is the medium,” Michael Hirsch, the project's developer, said on Twitter. The AI model attempts to reproduce the 10,000 original CryptoPunks, and the pixels it gets wrong are quantified as “slop.” A higher slop score, indicating greater deviation from the original, is considered more valuable.
Since its launch on May 1, the collection has generated over 23,000 transactions. Of the initial 10,000 NFTs, 1,348 have been permanently removed from circulation through a “Merge” function that combines two NFTs to create a new one with a higher slop score. The project is set to launch a corresponding token, $SLOP, with an initial market capitalization of approximately $50,000.
This economic model creates a system where speculation and artistic creation are linked. By merging NFTs, holders reduce the total supply and create a provably rarer asset, which in turn is expected to have a higher value when converted to the upcoming $SLOP token. The system allows holders to send an NFT to a “Void” to mint $SLOP tokens equivalent to the NFT’s slop score. Conversely, players can spend $SLOP to “revive” a random NFT from the void, with a 1% chance of generating a high-slop version. This creates a continuous cycle of NFT-to-token conversion.
The project's creator, Michael Hirsch, was also behind the ETHS inscription protocol, which reached a peak market capitalization of approximately $420 million. The launch of Slonks is seen by some as a signal of returning liquidity and appetite for innovation in the crypto market. The $SLOP token will launch with a 576,000 token liquidity pool, and for the first six hours, trading will be enabled before the Void function goes live, allowing for a period of pure price discovery.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
