- Emoji-identifiers called Yats are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Yats can be used as a personal URL or crypto-wallet address, replacing jumbled numbers and letters.
- “We believe that we have a chance to redefine how people think about online identity,” said Yat Labs founder Naveen Jain.
At a virtual auction last April, bidders fought for a chance to own an emoji.
A single golden key sold for $425,000. A rocketship-and-moon combo sold for $200,000. A frog-and-crown combo sold for $105,000.
You may be thinking: These high-flying prices for a digital picture sound a lot like bidding for crypto collectibles called NFTs. But this is a new craze — a craze for emoji-identifiers known as Yats that could become your online descriptor in Web3, or the next iteration of the internet.
A Yat is used as a person’s online identity, a link to a URL or crypto wallet address, for example. And according to Naveen Jain, the founder of Yat Labs, it’s a tool for “self-expression” that replaces jumbled numbers and letters currently used in URLs and crypto addresses.
“Emojis are a universal language,” he said. “You can tell incredible stories using emojis. We thought that could be a way to humanize these addresses.”
Yat Labs launched in February 2021, and in a year, the company sold about 160,000 Yats for about $20 million in revenue, said Jain, who was among CoinDesk’s most influential people of 2021 for his invention.
But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month, Yat prices may not be as high as before, if NFTs are any indication. Sales of the digital collectibles have plunged in recent weeks amid the war. Yat Labs said it’s been involved in donation efforts to Ukraine, but didn’t specify how. According to Elliptic data, the country has brought in $63 million worth of cryptocurrency from 120,000 donations.
Still, Yats have been popping up in prominent spaces on Twitter, where celebrities including Ke$ha and G-Eazy have placed their emoji-identifiers in their bio. G-Eazy’s is a bat-rose, while Ke$ha’s is a rainbow-rocketship-alien.
Single and double-emoji yats generally sell for higher prices because they’re rarer, especially given that Yat Labs only has 452 emojis currently in its set. But don’t worry, there will be enough yats to go around. With Yats able to come in five-emoji versions, there are about 19 trillion possible combinations, said Jain, allowing everyone on Earth to have about as many as they’d want.
“Our ambition is that ultimately we want every internet-connected user to have a Yat, at least one Yat,” he said. “We believe that we have a chance to redefine how people think about online identity.”
Jain said he envisions Yats as a way for people to “tell their story in Web3.”
By definition, Web3 is the successor to Web2 that will be based on blockchain technology and ideally be decentralized, giving ownership to individuals instead of large corporations. The concept has been widely debated, but Jain sees Web3 as a way for individuals to own their identities online and their Yats to be an expression of it.
“Imagine if your Yat is something like unicorn-robot-dancer,” Jain said. “In three characters, that’s really saying a lot. That’s like telling a whole story about somebody that literally would be impossible to tell with alphanumeric characters.”
