What is the Tweet DAO? The novel social media NFT project is a collection of 1000 NFTs, each of which gives the holder the right to post a single tweet from the DAO’s handle every 24 hrs. The phenomenon has taken crypto twitter by storm, with the handle amassing over 5,000 followers over a few days.
The collection minted for an ramping price, starting at 0.1 ETH and increasing in cost with the total minted, up to a max of 1 ETH. It currently commands a floor of 0.699 ETH at the time of writing. Apparently, people are willing to pay quite a pretty penny to participate in the fun. The contract is a standard ERC-721 with no special features. The heavy lifting for the utility of the project is done by a Twitter API on the project website.
This project taps into the particular flavor of chaos previously encountered in events like Twitch Plays Pokemon, the fish that play Pokemon, or the hamster that trades stocks by running in its cage. From chaos, a surprising order can emerge. The trading hamster was actually profitable, outperforming Warren Buffet. The fish beat Pokemon Sapphire. And the Tweet DAO has created some truly hilarious content.
The project is not without its issues, however. The account has already suffered a suspension after a mini-viral tweet making fun of another user was reported. Some users are using their tweet to shill NFT projects, or post NSFW content. Who knows how long the account will survive?
Why are users engaging in riskier posting than they might otherwise do on their personal accounts? This presents an interesting object lesson about the concept of an anonymity set. As an end user, you only see the Tweet DAO twitter handle. You don’t see which token holder created the post. This means that any one of the current holders could have made that tweet.
In this way, while you still gain information about who made the post, each individual user has plausible deniability.
This is the basic principle behind Tornado Cash, the most popular Ethereum privacy mixer protocol. Users put their funds into a pool, and use zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs to withdraw it from another account. This limits the set of accounts who could have withdrawn those funds to the set of accounts who withdrew from Tornado Cash after the deposit was made, but it cannot be definitively linked back to the depositor.
Who knows where this project will be after a few weeks? History suggests much of the hype will have died off. It might get banned if its users get too rowdy. Only time will tell. For now, sit back, and enjoy the show!
