What an amazing Lost Poets drop, masterfully and smoothly executed by Pak and Manifold — unlike anything in NFT history, allowing many small collectors to participate without gas wars (or lost gas):
Some of the innovations in the drop included:
1) Use of ERC1155 tokens (Page NFTs) that resulted in gas being paid on the number of transactions and not the number of token mints in the transaction. A transaction to mint 1000 tokens (max) costs the same as to min 1 token.
2) Have noted how generous Pak is in previous one-pagers: ~11% of Pages were airdropped to $ASH holders. The top $ASH holder with 170k got ~80 NFTs airdropped while the smallest wallet to get an NFT required only ~25 $ASH (despite having 6,800x less $ASH). Pak has always favored small collectors and this edition was meant to be as inclusive as possible:
Bonus Page NFTs were also given to buyers starting at the rate of 25% and dropping to 0% as the items sold out.
3) Leaderboard sweet spots that created small sections of competition as collectors jockeyed to purchase and get into them. These sweet spots located on numbers divisibly by 5 gave out more rewards (valuable Origin Poets) than neighboring spots.
Now, the Theories…
With that said and still in the early stages of the story, I wanted to entertain a few theories (again, wildly speculative) on what may be forthcoming. Pak referred to the Lost Poets drop in April right after The Fungible:
My reasoning is that aside from the two ASH Exclusives, I don’t believe there will be another open edition by Pak any time soon or maybe ever. Lost Poets is a game, and will have multiple reveals:
The Page NFTs (more here on the drop background) may have more than meets the eye: they are mint passes to claiming Poet NFTs, they are Pages/ERC1155 tokens, and they are tickets as well:
With the above background, let’s entertain a few speculative theories while also referencing the Library of Babel (keyword is speculative and some of this could be totally wrong/not financial advice):
1) 10 Page Min: Pages may be needed to be kept as pages for what’s next - imagine they are some kind of "requirement” to do something and you may need 10 Page NFTs or denominations of 10.
The motivation behind this inference is from a much earlier Pak message referenced in May:
“Tickets to everywhere” could be the ticket into the performance that is about to begin. “Tickets to nowhere” could be either tickets kept as tickets (but that’s already what a ticket does, allowing entrance) or a ticket that is burned (sent to the dead address). In any event, 10 Page NFTs/tickets may be a minimum needed (speculative) and coincidentally, that is the default number of Page NFTs to be minted on Lost Poets during the drop.
2) Poets Have Roles: There are a lot of Poets (1024 Origins and 65,536 latents that come from Origins). It is not possible they are all the same, maybe like in the Library of Babel…
3) Poets Can Change/Mutate:
"In this fractal labyrinth, these forgotten poets from 1024 different origins roam between their hidden 256 selves." From: lostpoets.xyz/
Each Origin poet has 64 Latent poets. But remember, the 1024 Origin Poets mix with 256 possible genes to give birth to the 65,536 latent poets. To generate 64 unique Latents you only need a maximum of 6 genes x the Origin (2^6 as each gene can either be on or off).
Like with mutations that Bored Ape Yacht Club introduced, what if Poets can be “mutated” as the +250 other genes not expressed get turned on (or off)?
4) Focus on Numbers and Multiples of 2:
5) Prize At the End: In the Library of Babel, there is a myth:
“We also have knowledge of another superstition from that period: belief in what was termed the Book-Man. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god.”
Given that all the poets are in a single room (and maybe on a single shelf), it is possible that one of the poets, or something, is there for which we must find as part of the game.
As we customize our poets by naming them and writing stories (unsure how that plays into it), there will be more cross interactions. What might be a prize at the end if there is one? It would be something of extraordinary worth or of personal value - prizes are gifts.
Conclusion
The images of poets Pak has shared on Twitter are mesmerizing, some chillingly human even if designed by AI.
Lost Poets tagline is “ab aeterno” which is Latin for "from eternity", a phrase used to mean "since the beginning" or "for long ages" (source: Wikipedia). Lost Poets right now feels like the beginning of something that was created a long time ago.
Some people point out that that this is a large number of NFTs and when allowed to be burned in 365 days, will depress the $ASH burn rate.
I disagree. These Poets are all Pak 1/1s and after playing the game with the Poets, many of which game players will name, will you really destroy them? That is akin to selling beloved video game characters you spent time acquiring weapons and traits for. Rewards will be found by those who play, ever-increasing in value. There will be flippers who are short-term profit-oriented but the masters of the game will likely be the ones who “win.”
Thanks for the analysis. Hope that the minimum entry of 10 is not happening. That would be 2.5 ETH which would be tough on small collectors.
Nice work, some great insights here. Even though there are 65,536 Poets in existence, the actual number available in the market will be far lower due to single addresses holding multiple Poets, Pages never exchanged for Poets etc. This is the brilliance of the design of the game, the community is very much in control of the outcomes. My own view is that the OP and its 64 latents is going to be extremely valuable as you can then ‘write’ part of the game.