SNEAK PEEK
- Eric Wall’s Orb Land project was unable to attract user interest.
- The Harberger Tax proved impractical in the Orb Land context.
- Orb Land’s centralized control undermined its blockchain credibility.
Once a proponent of Ethereum NFTs with practical utility, Eric Wall announced the closure of his Orb Land project. The initiative, which aimed to showcase NFTs beyond speculative trading, has been inactive for over a month and has officially ended.
Wall touted Orbs, the NFTs at the center of Orb Land, as having real utility. However, the project failed to attract significant user interest. Launched on April 10, 2023, Orb Land created only five orbs owned by crypto influencers Wall, Nic Carter, Justin Drake, Tarun Chitra, and Zaki Manian. Despite their combined following of 714,000 on social media platform X, the project gained little traction.
Wall co-founded Orb Land with Jonas Lekevicius of cybersecurity company Cube3. Although Lekevicius contributed to coding intelligent contracts, website creation, and design management, he never owned an orb. The project’s failure not only disproved the utility of Ethereum NFTs but also demonstrated the impracticality of the Harberger Tax in this context.
The Harberger Tax, a central feature of Orb Land, involved a user-specified tax rate assessed while holding an asset. Orb holders set a price at which they were willing to sell, and Orb Land drained a percentage of that amount from their wallets every 12 seconds until the orb was sold. Promoters like Wall and Nic Carter extensively discussed this innovative fee structure, describing it as a way to “auction off a recurring slice of your time.”
However, the concept did not resonate with users. Nic Carter later regretted the burdensome “homework” required by orb ownership. The project, intended to prove NFTs’ non-speculative utility, ultimately demonstrated the opposite.
Critics noted that Orb Land remained centralized, with management controlling ownership and transfer functions. This centralized control undermined the project’s credibility as a decentralized blockchain initiative.
In the end, Orb Land failed to find a market fit, highlighting the ongoing challenge of proving the practical utility of NFTs beyond speculative trading. As Wall closed the project, he thanked the few participants and acknowledged that Orb Land could have been a non-crypto website, further questioning the necessity of its blockchain foundation.
Orb Land’s closure underscores the challenges faced by crypto projects in achieving widespread adoption and practical use, reaffirming that the primary use of NFTs remains speculative rather than functional.
