• Written by: Harpreet Kaur
• Wed, 09 Feb 2022
•   India

Bengaluru, February 9, 2022: Will emojis take the place of usernames on the Web3? Yat, a Nashville-based tech firm, believes this, and with 160,000 units sold for a total of $20 million, it appears that many regular people agree. A Yat is a string of one to five emojis which would be used as your […]

What is a Yat, and why are people willing to pay $425,000 for emojis?

Bengaluru, February 9, 2022: Will emojis take the place of usernames on the Web3? Yat, a Nashville-based tech firm, believes this, and with 160,000 units sold for a total of $20 million, it appears that many regular people agree.

A Yat is a string of one to five emojis which would be used as your virtual username, website URL, as well as digital wallet payment address. Although not all Yats are tokenized, it’s a hybrid between a nonfungible token (NFT) as well as a domain address.

The business noted in its Discord channel, “Yat allows you to use emojis as your worldwide username as well as identity on the internet.”

“Imagine being known as fire-snake or robot-ghost-crown instead of coffeequeen98 or jake2456@emailxyz.com. By owning a Yat — let’s say ocean-trident-palm tree — it’s yours forever. You are the ~only~ one on earth who owns these emojis.”

Yat may theoretically be a decentralised alternative to the present Domain Name System (DNS), which is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). DNS organises and assists people in finding information on the internet through a centralised, hierarchical system.

Since July 2021, Yat owners have always had the opportunity to tokenize their string of emojis as just an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for a fee, but buying a Yat isn’t just about minting an NFT.

Owners should first use Yat’s “visualizer tool” to produce a short animation of the emoji string before turning the Yat into an NFT. The visualisation is then linked to the Yat, and it can be minted as an NFT on OpenSea to be held or traded.

Buying a one- to five-character design may cost anything from $4 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, including additional expenses to make it into an NFT. The higher the price, the shorter and much more memorable the combo.

At the Yat Destiny auction in mid-2021, the much more expensive Yat was indeed the single character of a golden key, which sold for $425,000. On Opensea, Yat has a trading volume of 410 ETH ($1,258,622 USD) just at the moment of typing.

Paris Hilton (queen crown-sparkle), Lil Wayne (alien-music note), as well as Kesha are among the noteworthy celebrity investors in Yat (rainbow-rocket ship-alien).

The endeavour, however, has not been without its difficulties. They have included the commonplace, such as complaints that Yat URLs are difficult to discover because typing an emoji sequence on a regular QWERTY keypad isn’t always straightforward.

On the other hand, Yat co-founder as well as former CEO Riccardo Spagnia “Fluffypony” was detained in the United States in August 2021, where he awaited extradition to South Africa on charges of fraud. Yat has nothing to do with the fraud charges. Yat was founded in February 2021 and now employs 55 people.