Free Mint Bot Wrecks Tasty Toastys Founder’s greenchipzonly Goblintown DAO

What started out as a fun fan project has since become a valuable lesson for Tasty Toastys founder Chanel Lee.

Goblintown NFTs have taken the market by storm, and Lee has shown her support by not only changing her Twitter name to “chanelgₒbₗᵢₙcoco,” but also by creating a DAO to help the community buy into the degen craze.

Read More: Tasty Toastys Founder Starts DAO to Buy Goblintown NFTs

Named greenchipzonly, Lee’s DAO has 6999 NFTs that each offer 1 vote at 0.02 ETH + gas fees. However, soon after launching the DAO, Lee’s project was caught up among Goblintown NFT derivatives.

“The trend for the past couple of weeks was any free mint related to Goblintwon NFTs,” Lee said to Blockhead. “On OpenSea yesterday it was all Goblintown NFT derivatives in the top 10, so it was very difficult for greenchipzonly to cut through the noise.”

Despite her best efforts in explicitly stating the raised funds would be used to buy a Goblintown NFT, Lee received backlash from those who confused it with a derivative and thus criticised her for charging for a project that was originally a free mint.

Lee humbly admitted to Blockhead that she was “outdated” in thinking that all DAOs operated in a similar way in terms of raising funds to buy an NFT. Realising the error of her ways, she conceded to telling her developer “to call it a day and release the remaining NFTs as CC0 art for anyone else moving forward.”

Read more: This Singaporean Millennial is Creating NFTs to Build a Real-World “Toasty” Home Decor Brand

“I also didn’t want to be in a situation where I raised 3 ETH and still not be able to afford a Goblintown NFT. When we first launched the DAO, we priced it at 0.02 ETH because the Goblins were about 2-4 ETH. Now they’re 6-8 ETH! So we’d need a lot of people minting a lot of the chips before we could even buy one Goblintown NFT!”

Free But Obviously Not Free

However, when Lee’s developer flipped the switch from 0.02ETH to 0.00ETH, a third of the NFTs were immediately minted out, even before Lee publicly announced the switch. People then began trading the free NFTs on OpenSea, thinking that they were entitled to be part of the DAO.

“No, if you’re not going to pay for it, I’m not going to give you the Goblin! It doesn’t make sense right!” Lee said with a laugh.

Lee then discovered the existence of a Free Mint Bot Twitter account that alerts degens about free mint projects. Although Lee’s developer silently flipped the switch to 0.00ETH, the Free Mint Bot scanner picked up on it and alerted its followers.

“It’s a learning experience for us that people just follow the Free Mint Bot and mint rubbish!” Lee said.

Moving forward, Lee will fulfil her promise to those who paid for a greenchipzonly NFT. “We will upload the equity accordingly to the vault. Everything is still fine for those who paid,” Lee reassured.

Free Could Be Costly

Although Lee can laugh about her mistakes now, there’s a serious warning underpinning the mayhem. “The Free Mint Bot posts all the free mints they can find,” Lee explains. “But now there’s been proof that the account also posts wallet-draining mints.”

“The Twitter bot cannot identify if the project is a scam or not. If someone can build a scanner bot that can find 0.00ETH prices, they can also build something that can scan for “all permissions” – a function that would give someone access to your wallet.”

On a Twitter Spaces session last night, Lee said she’d work on something for buyers who were affected, though conceded that her options were limited as the cut she received for the 1.5ETH trading volume – which is around 8% – wouldn’t amount to much. An announcement is expected in the next 48 hours.