Nashville-based digital startup Yat believes, with 160,000 Yat sold at a total of $20 million that lots of ordinary people are interested. A Yat is a string of one to five emojis that may be used as your digital username, website URL, and digital wallet payment address. Although not all Yats are tokenized, it’s a hybrid between a nonfungible token (NFT) and a domain address. ‘Yat lets you use emojis as your universal username and identity on the internet,’ the company wrote in its Discord server. “Imagine being known as fire-snake or robot-ghost-crown instead of coffeequeen98 or [email protected]. By owning a Yat — let’s say ocean-trident-palm tree — it’s yours forever. You are the ~only~ one on earth who owns these emojis.” Yat could theoretically be a decentralized alternative to the present Domain Name System (DNS), which is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). DNS organizes and assists people in finding information on the internet through a centralized, hierarchical system. A one- to five-character design can cost anything from $4 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus additional expenses to convert it into an NFT. The higher the price, the shorter and more memorable the combo. At the Yat Destiny auction in mid-2021, the most expensive Yat was the single character of a golden key, which sold for $425,000. On Opensea, Yat has a trading volume of 410 ETH ($1,258,622 USD) at the t...
