Orb Land Shutdown Proves Almost No One Cares About NFT Usefulness

Once touted as proof that Ethereum NFTs have uses beyond speculative trading, Eric Wall is shutting down his Orb Land project. The project has been dormant for over a year month.

The orbs were meant to be “NFTs with real utility,” according to to Wall. In reality, almost no one has used his sophisticated proof of concept.

On April 10, 2023, Wall created his orb. It is now abandoned“Thanks to everyone who participated,” he concluded casually.

The entire project only spawned five orbs from crypto celebrities Wall, Nic Carter, Justin Drake, Tarun Chitra, and Zaki Manian. Even their number of subscribers 714,000 on X I couldn’t attract more orb thinkers.

Wall co-founded Orb Land with Jonas Lekevicius of cybersecurity firm Cube3. Lekevicius never owned an orb, but helped code smart contracts, build the website, and manage drawings.

Eric Wall writes the final chapter of a story with an ending opposite to the one he had planned.

Nobody cares about non-speculative utility NFTs

Comically, the project disproved the exact concept it was supposed to prove. Not only did it fail to prove that Ethereum NFTs have any non-speculative utility, it also failed to prove a modern use case for the Harberger tax.

A Harberger tax is a user-specified tax rate that applies while the user holds an asset. Orb holders specified a price at which they were willing to sell, and then Orb Land would drain a percentage of that amount until they sold the orb. Orbs drained ETH from orb holders’ wallets every 12 seconds (each Ethereum block).

Orb Land proponents like Wall and Nic Carter have spoken at length about the innovative Harberger fee in a wide variety of media interviews. They’ve praised its innovative fee structure that allows you to “auction off a recurring slice of your time.” They’ve promised that orb summons—written responses to orb holders’ questions that Orb Land hashed ceremoniously on the Ethereum blockchain—are just one proof of concept in a wealth of compelling use cases for non-speculative, useful NFTs.

In the end, no one cared. Carter complained that owning an orb burdened him with “duties” that he unfortunately had to type out to unwanted summoners.

Today, since the inception of Ethereum’s ERC-721 “NFT” standard, the primary use of NFTs is no longer utility but speculating on their resale price.

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Like most cryptocurrency projects, Wall’s blockchain project has remained centralized. Even Wall himself admitted that there is no reason why Orb Land couldn’t just be a non-crypto website.

Indeed, no one could ever possess an Orb Land orb without requesting it from the leadership. Orbs also have no transfer function, so the leadership unilaterally royalty rates and collections applied.

Orb Land was a simple company that didn’t have much product-market fit and is now closing down. failed to prove that NFTs have non-speculative utility beyond niche enthusiasts and wealthy celebrity fans.

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