Thanks to JOYWORLD for publishing this article with us! If you’d like to write a guest post for our blog, let us know at contact@opensea.io.

Hello friend, I’m John Orion Young. You may know me as JOY from JOYWORLD!

JOYWORLD is a different reality where everyone and thing is conspiring to make you feel JOYful and creative. Most people who visit JOYWORLD for too long get pronoia, constantly feeling like the universe is conspiring in their favor.

JOYs are the beings that inhabit JOYWORLD. Made by hand in virtual reality, JOYs are manifested with a spirit of non-attachment and non-achievement. This enables them to arrive onto our reality plane in the purest form without some extra feeling of gains or other expectations. Each JOY is a unique 1 of 1 muse that can only be owned by one JOY Collector at a time. The JOY Collector inherits the JOY’s muse magic when it’s in their collection which represents the sacred magical bond between artist and collector.

In the early days of JOYWORLD, you could steal your friends JOY if you were willing to pay a little more than they did. I built the first JOYWORLD contract to be what’s known in the Ethereum world as a “hot-potato”. When a JOY would sell, the contract would raise the price and automatically relist the JOY for sale for the new collector at a higher price. Each new JOY would be released for about 0.001 ETH or around $1USD. A frenzy would ensue and after about 10-15 trades, the price would be sitting in the triple digits, the highest bidding collector would have their JOY and everyone who collected had more ETH in their account than before they began. JOYWORLD would receive the initial 0.001 ETH and 10% on each of these trades.

This hot potato version of the JOYWORLD marketplace launched on April 22, 2018 with Original JOY (token 0 now token 1) along with 12 other JOY friends. In just a little over the course of a year, 82 JOYs in total were added to that contract. Those JOYs were traded between JOY Collectors over 1,400 times. Maybe because it was my first code project but I loved a lot about this version of the JOY art market! The mechanic of the contract setting the price, the thrill of emotions when you capture a JOY or have it stolen from you, the low 0.001 ETH starting price, and rewarding collectors quickly for collecting JOYs.

This contract had some key flaws though. It required a lot of upkeep on the frontend when the JOYs were calling me to create more of them. The hot potato prevented JOY Collectors full ownership forcing them to always be selling at a set price no matter the market value of ETH. Also, the contract made the marketplace centralized and JOYWORLD should always work towards decentralization. JOY Collectors deserved more, so with the help of Beserk’s power to freeze worlds, we froze the JOYWORLD contract and took the JOYs out to OpenSea.

A new contract called JOYWORLD S2 (season two) was minted using the OpenSea Storefront Manager in December of 2019, and fresh JOY tokens were issued to the OG JOY Collectors. With the minting of a brand new JOY named Juicy Jackalope the great unfreezing of JOYWORLD began. JOYs became fully ERC721 compliant, JOY Collectors set their own prices on JOYs, and for the first time, JOY Collectors sent JOYs to friends! JOYs can be hodled too and now no one can steal your JOY!

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This transition resulted in a lot of JOYs trading hands with much higher values than previously imagined with new JOY Collectors arriving. Increasing the average JOY price by 750%, from 0.54 ETH to 4.59 ETH! On the old contract, JOYbot was the most expensive JOY at 2.71ETH. On the new contract, JOYbot is currently listed for 500 ETH and Bubble Gum Borg became the highest-selling JOY at 16.7 ETH!

Both of these contracts have something in common – the amazing JOY Collectors who make the whole thing work! It’s beautiful the way we can have a symbiotic relationship between artist and collectors; outside of the interference of galleries, museums, or curators. This creates a pure, shared esthetic and vision for JOYWORLD.

You can really see it in individual JOY Collectors collections. OG collector Devil has very specific JOYs he battled to hold on to for a very long time. New collector Jim has a shared vision of one day taking JOYs across the metaverse and has collected the JOYs he is most excited to experience. Our current top collector WhaleShark has taken things way far out by building an entire social money called $Whale that is backed by 16 JOYs and other high-value crypto artworks. There are so many awesome JOY Collectors doing all kinds of radical other things, even using their JOYs as collateral for loans!

I am very grateful so many brilliant and interesting people are interested in collecting JOYs and being a major part of the creation of JOYWORLD. There is no way to know where this journey will take us. Just being together on the trip to JOYWORLD is our destination. The latest JOYs will be auctioned back to back on OpenSea, starting with Sid Viscous.

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Peace, love,

JOY