I recently dug into this Goblin NFT project and found a pretty interesting phenomenon. Electronic music pioneer Steve Aoki recently bought two Goblintown NFTs, and as a result, the whole community started discussing the “Aoki Curse,” an urban legend.

As for this curse, it mainly has to do with what happened after he previously purchased Moonbirds and Azuki—those projects’ floor prices plummeted. This time, the moment he made his move, the floor price of Goblin NFTs also followed downward, dropping by 15% over 24 hours and straight-up plunging from its prior level. Many people are asking: will the “Aoki Curse” really come true for Goblin NFTs?

What’s interesting, though, is that the curse actually gave Goblintown a burst of attention. In this bear-market environment, projects that can attract this much focus really aren’t that common. Goblin NFTs themselves are a collection of 10,000 weird cartoon-illustrated avatars, featuring all kinds of strange characters—odd dragons, wizards, zombies, and more—who all live in Goblin Town. This “weird” style, oddly enough, became its selling point, and it unexpectedly went viral right after launch.

Unlike most NFT projects, Goblin NFTs didn’t follow the old playbook of “crash after the peak.” Typically, NFTs hit their trading high on the day of minting and then keep sliding down. But Goblintown has maintained an upward trajectory—trading volume may fluctuate, but overall it’s trending higher. This is mainly due to two reasons: first, it uses a free public sale issuance model, lowering the barrier to participation; second, the cartoon characters borrow heavily from celebrity likenesses—for example, Hogwarts’ headmaster from *Harry Potter*, the Hulk from *The Avengers*, and even Steve Aoki himself.

That said, to be honest, the practical utility of this Goblin NFT project is currently quite weak. The team has openly admitted that aside from the art style itself, there’s no actual roadmap. There is, however, a “Goblin Burger” feature: users who hold NFTs can mint for free, but these burgers currently have no use whatsoever. The official website hints that there will be bigger plans in the future, but it’s unclear what those are specifically.

Judging by community participation, the project’s Twitter follower count has reached 66,000, with more than 2,000 new followers added every day—growth has been pretty solid. There’s also an unverified rumor that the operation behind it is being handled by BAYC’s team, Yuga Labs, and this “speculation” seems to have sparked interest from many people. But the issue is that the project team is anonymous—right now there’s only a Twitter account, and information disclosure is insufficient.

There are also plenty of risks. The smart contract hasn’t been audited, the metadata is stored on IPFS rather than being fully on-chain, and the team lacks transparency—these are all common problems with NFT projects. What’s even more concerning is that the official page essentially has no Discord community at all, which is indeed rather rare for NFT projects.

Overall, if you analyze it using conventional logic, Goblin NFTs don’t seem like a project that can truly succeed. But they’re doing the opposite in a bear market—growing against the tide. The remaining question is whether this project can maintain this level of hype, and its long-term development prospects are still very difficult to judge.