WTF is $LIT? A short primer on a mysterious NFT project.
Today a project came onto my radar from some fellow collectors over at Proof Collective.
The front door of this project is Robert De Niro’s face turned into a gif-style NFT that changes in real time reacting to the recent price movements of Ethereum. This front door led me down a weird AF rabbit hole, so if you’re looking for a journey, I invite you to proceed.
The project is called LIT. In a space rife with scams, rug pulls, and unkept promises, LIT raises every red flag I normally use to evaluate projects. If you’re looking to identify red flags for NFT projects, here’s a great guide.
The Red Flags
An anonymous team
No roadmap
Unverified projects on OpenSea
An unverified twitter with only 8000 followers at time of writing
Celebrity endorsements
A token with no utility (their words, not mine)
None of these individually are dealbreakers, nor are they rare in the NFT space. Projects with these qualities have succeeded, but taking them in their entirety is alarming. Despite all of this, it’s one of the most intriguing projects I’ve found. Through some combination of blunt honesty and an allergy to the typical hype mechanics employed by most projects, the team is able to negate my skepticism. Call me a sucker for mystique, or an idiot, I’m not sure, but this project has me pulled in.
Part 1: The Cozomo De Medici Airdrop
Let’s start at the beginning. The team created 100,000,000,000 LIT tokens on 12/1. While most token releases are typically super scammy, with pre-sales, and pre-sales of the pre-sales, and VC’s getting early access and all of those people dumping for a profit on the first buyers. This team went in a different direction and released their token in a uniquely low key way. In their own words:
“Presale = you are exit liquidity. There is no presale. The launch will be announced in our Telegram group. We will be unable to give an exact time or contract address not because we want you glued to your phone, but because of our anti-bot measures in place.”
My takeaway from this is the project isn’t just a cash grab. If it was, there are better ways to do it.
So on 12/1/21 the contract went live and the token began trading. The LIT team airdropped 50% of the token supply to the wallet of Cozomo De Medici. Cozomo is a prolific NFT collector with a well-known collection. He is also probably Snoop Dogg or, at least, Snoop Dogg claimed he is Cozomo de Medici.
These types of airdrops happen all the time and can be sketchy. For people who hold well known wallets. For example, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin or Cozomo are constantly getting dropped tokens and NFTs into their wallets. Most of it is an attempt from projects to generate some hype and get some momentum, or outright scam the person.
The well-known meme coin Shiba did this to Vitalik Buterin, airdropping his wallet 410 trillion tokens. He burnt 90%, and sent the other 10%, at the time $1 billion dollars, to India to aid with the coronavirus pandemic. High five to Vitalik for making a special trip to Canada to retrieve his private keys to make it happen.
The $LIT tokens airdrop got Cozomo’s attention and he connected with the LIT team, the result of their ensuing conversation can be found in this Tweetstorm.
TLDR on Tweetstorm: Cozomo chats with the team, and becomes the first person outside of the team to hear their vision in full. He appreciates its boldness and claims that much of the vision involves “pushing innovation both technically and socially via NFTs.” Cozomo ups the ante by proposing an even greater vision. He hints and speculates at loads of perks, and envisions a cultural DAO that centers around the token holders, producing art that pushes cultural change through events, charities, and collaborations with artists. Then, Cozomo returns the tokens, at the time valued at $35 million to the team, asking the founders to use this money to execute the newly forged vision…
While Cozomo’s thread is riddled with buzzwords, it stands as an open ended vision that the first two projects (described below) begin to deliver on. It also serves as a vetting of an otherwise unknown team with no track record.
The Degenaissance Drop
Prior to any of the projects being released a snapshot was taken of token ownership as of 12/7.
A then-relatively unknown digital artist named Rata, known and loved by Cozomo, was commissioned to create an NFT piece exclusively for LIT. Known as the Degenaissance collection, its utility serves as an invitation to the LIT Dao for anyone who holds this piece.
These Genesis holders mark the beginnings of the DAO. Genesis wallets were also grandfathered into eligibility for Project 2 — instead of the 2 million LIT token requirement, genesis wallets could be eligible with 1 million. The same token requirement that made them eligible for Project 1.
LIT Project 1
Project 1 is a book to be penned by NYT 10 time best selling author Neil Strauss. Neil confirmed the project on his twitter. The genesis holders will be allowed to mint this NFT, and one of them will randomly be selected to be given complete commercial ownership rights of the book. 🤯 It is interesting to note Neil has also been retained to write the origin stories for Bored Ape Yacht Club.
The LIT team is coining this the first fully decentralized book, and stated:
you will be able to read it in its entirety…directly on your OpenSea account … this innovative use of technology, developed by Transient Labs, is something that likely none of you have interacted with before … Its smart contract plus the metadata allows for a tactile, page-turning reading experience.
I’m not sure if this is actually the first book on the blockchain, but it definitely sounds like there are a few aspects of this project that are novel.
LIT Project 2
Project 2 is the Robert De Niro video I described in the introduction. The video adjusts his emotional reactions to the recent price changes of Ethereum. I wasn’t sure if this was deepfaked, or pirated from somewhere else. I spoke with two deepfake experts who both said they thought the video quality was was of superior quality to what can currently be done with deepfakes. I also suspect given the involvement of Neil Strauss and Cozomo, it’s unlikely the project is illegally using De Niro’s likeness. However at this point I haven’t found anything from the actor confirming his involvement.
The Mysteries
The thing with LIT is that they are connecting all of these projects together in mysterious ways that the team is withholding until “the right time”.
Mystery 1: Project One has an attribute called a “Boost” that says “100% chance of survival.”
Mystery 2: The Rata NFT drop ( The Degenaissance) was commissioned very specifically. The team dictated the exact pieces that should be hanging in the frames. There are 5 of these frames, and also 5 projects we know for sure the LIT team has planned.
Mystery 3— The Robert De Niro NFT has an attribute called “Culture” which seem to be evenly distributed throughout the collection and seem to be the beginning characters of an ETH address.
Conclusion
This project has done a lot in five weeks, and still seems to be below the radar of most. One of the most intriguing aspects to me is their lack of hype. Where most projects are asking you to like, follow, retweet, tag nine friends, join their telegram, discord, and name your first born after the projects founder to be offered a chance at MAYBE reserving a spot on a pre-sale, this team has done none of that. To quote the project lead 0xPamplemousse:
“Instead of melting faces, we like to hold one candle up to the face at a time. That is a better way to build long term.”
They have been able to rapidly engage, impress, and produce with Cozomo, Neil Strauss, and Robert De Niro, and we are only 5 weeks in. There’s a lot more to research here, I may do a part two as this project continues to unfold.
Housekeeping
Not that this needs to be said, but this project is a long shot and it can go to zero. I’m a stranger on the internet who you should not be taking financial advice from.
I pieced a lot of this together from disparate sources, so if I am missing anything, please shoot me a DM on Twitter: https://twitter.com/asimplenoochie, I am happy to make corrections.
Special Thanks
Thanks to Pinski for all of the input on this, @TreyRatcliff for introducing me to the project and the whole Proof Collective for their incredible shared knowledge.
Happy investing!
Noochie