Disclaimer: I have a fat bag of PANDORA; take my bullishness with a pinch of salt.

Gm degens,

If you’re reading this, I’m willing to guess it’s down to one of two things: you’re looking for confirmation bias on your PANDORA bags/NFTs, or you are coping hard and want to figure out why your timeline is discussing this new experiential token design. Either way, you’ve come to the right place.

Like all good things in crypto, they start with an origin story you couldn’t make up.

A few days ago (early Feb 2024), a new token launched called Uniswap Emerald (EMERALD) that captured the mindshare of some of the most experimental degens in this space due to its unique design… The problem, however, is that the initial idea was all pie in the sky, and it was later revealed that the “dev” was not actually a dev and had used ChatGPT to create some mythical token/NFT hybrid.

The plot thickened when the token gained some immediate traction, and then, as if by magic, the contract suffered an exploit, resulting in lots of early degens losing their paper gains almost instantly.

A tale as old as time itself. A new shiny object gains traction, only to be rugged. Thousands of dollars are lost, dreams shattered, and everyone moves on to the next thing.

Instead, this time, a small group of people couldn’t shake that there might be something good to be taken from the redacted “dev” who mistakenly created something that could potentially change the industry forever. Another tale as old as time is that of short-sighted scammers who couldn’t hold on after seeing a few gs in their wallet when potentially there were millions to be made and legacies to be had.

Anyway, this group of Avengers said: “fuck this idiot, we are going to take this idea and run with it properly,” and holy shit, did they…  

I won’t go into the full story of how this played out. But if you want to read how the drama unfolded in detail, read the thread above. To understand more about ERC404 and Pandora, continue below…

Note: Pandora is NOT a fork of Emerald; it is entirely different in nearly all respects. There was something to the initial idea, but Pandora is the true OG here.

What is ERC404?

“ERC404 is an experimental, mixed ERC20 / ERC721 implementation, with native liquidity and fractionalization” - 0xacme (creator of ERC404)

So, what does this mean in ape-speak? ERC20 - Basically, every fungible token you have ever traded on Ethereum or any EVM-equivalent chain will use the ERC20 token standard. This is a standardized framework that is adopted across the industry that allows tokens to be created, issued, and deployed.

Liquidity pools on Unsiwap and other DEXs enable ERC20-ERC20 permissionless trading.

ERC721 - This is another token standard, but this is for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), i.e., each token is unique.

So, in short, ERC20 (token), ERC721 (NFT)... Simple.

ERC404, however, is a hybrid between the two. Stay with me.

Credit: https://x.com/wsbmod/status/1753379676020789383?s=20

Using the first actual implementation of ERC404, Pandora is an experiment token design with 10,000 tokens and 10,000 corresponding “replicants” in the form of 10,000 NFTs.

So, what happens when you buy a PANDORA token on Uniswap?

For argument's sake, you buy 1 PANDORA on Uniswap. Once you hit confirm in your wallet and complete the transaction, you will part ways with your ETH and, in return, receive the 1 PANDORA token plus 1 Pandora NFT.

When you receive the NFT, it is generated from a mint contract, thus wholly random, and can be of any rarity, much like a regular NFT mint.

If you decide you want to sell your 1 PANDORA token, you resell it on Uniswap, and in doing so, the NFT in your wallet is burnt.

The Pandora NFTs do have some rarities attached to them (in their current form), and if you are hoping to scoop a rare item, you could opt to either trade in and out of the liquidity pool or transfer some tokens back and forth between your wallets… do this all at your own risk and don’t come crying to me if you accidentally burn a rare NFT by transferring a token to another wallet.

Transferring NFTs to a new wallet does not affect the NFT. Only transferring the token results in a burn and minting of the new NFT.

Just as you can sell your PANDORA tokens on Uniswap, you can also sell your Pandora NFTs on OpenSea and Blur. Blur recently announced a Pandora integration, which is kinda unheard of given this concept is four days old.

So, given the different rarities of the NFTs, there could be some interesting arbitrage here in that the PANDORA price kinda represents the floor price of the NFTs as there are 10,000 tokens and 10,000 NFTs.

Rarities

Green boxes: approximately 39.45%

Blue boxes: approximately 23.44%

Purple boxes: approximately 19.53%

Orange boxes: approximately 11.72%

Red boxes: approximately 5.86%

Credit: Pandora Telegram

If you managed to scoop a rare item from the LP or from a transfer, you could list this NFT higher than the floor/token price on OpenSea or Blur, sell it to a willing buyer, and then use the proceeds to buy more PANDORA… good ponzinomics.

That said, we have no idea what the hell these NFTs are/will be, so I’m not touching mine currently.

Pandora FAQs

So, there might be a few questions I can hear you asking yourself…

1. What happens if you buy 0.9 PANDORA?

You WILL receive the tokens, but you WILL NOT receive the NFT.

1. What happens if I buy 0.9 PANDORA and then 0.1, totalling 1 PANDORA?

Once your wallet owns 1 PANDORA token, an NFT will be automatically minted into your wallet.

1. If I own 3 PANDORA tokens, how do I know which NFT I will sell if I were to sell 1 PANDORA token on Uniswap?

The best move here would be to sell the Pandora NFT on Blur or OpenSea that you don’t mind getting rid of, and then the token will automatically be sold along with that. This way, you don’t sell your rare Pandora NFT.

1. What happens if I transfer the NFT and not the token?

Transferring the NFTs will not affect anything. So if you have, say, one rare and one common, move the rare to a separate wallet and then transfer/sell/buy the token in the original wallet to try to get a higher rarity NFT.

If there are any comments on this post, I’ll try to add more FAQs to this section.

Why are ERC404 and Pandora important?

Well, if you’ve been following my own thoughts or the general coverage of blocmates for a while, you will have seen our bullishness for NFT financialization.

We have interviewed and written countless research reports on the whole NFT-fi sector and found the early iterations of Sudo Swap, NFT Perp, and even blur to be real 0-1 innovations.

The issue is primarily for the on-chain protocols that are still in their very nascent stages, and some have even gone back to the drawing board a few times to try to make the products work.

We’ve also seen the fractionalization of NFTs, most notably stuff like Fiesty Doge (NFD) and Own The Doge, which were the original doge meme images sold as NFTs at auction for several millions and then fractionalized so everyone can own a piece of internet history.

So, there is demand for fractionalization, financialization and increased liquidity around NFT collections, and ERC404 seems like a huge step to achieve this.

There are not many times in this space that I see real promise in something this new coming to market but Pandora and the idea of ERC404 is one of those times.

We will see how this thing plays out as it is still extremely high risk and, I believe, unaudited, but it has captured the mindshare of some of the best and brightest in the industry even after a few days.

Floor Protocol has expressed its interest in implementing ERC404 and Pandora.

Wasabi has listed Pandora NFT perps.

Vector has agreed on a partnership with Pandora.

CFW has announced he will be launching a collection on the Pandora ERC404 standard.

Peapods Finance just announced wrapped PANDORA.

How big can this get?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. this is such a crazy paradigm shift, and it’s extremely young. It could be gone in a week, but I don’t think this kind of excitement is for nothing.

A few thoughts I have are that it could be huge for gaming, loot boxes, lotteries/raffles, etc. Additionally, if there is an infrastructure built to enable already existing NFT collections' instant liquidity in the form of an ERC404 wrapper, then things could get really interesting.

I expect a huuuuuuuuuge explosion of ERC404s to come out over the coming weeks in all shapes and sizes. I think larger collections i.e., 100,000 NFTS with a corresponding lower token unit bias could be interesting.

There will be rugs along the way, so stay safe, as this is unchartered territory. If the development that happened on top of something like Friend Tech was anything to go by, there will be lots of teams right now building the infrastructure around this concept and gearing up to launch early betas over the coming weeks. We’ll cover them all at blocmates.

There’s also an interesting development happening over on Solana with SPL20 tokens which have a lot of similarities to ERC404. Tensor, the main NFT marketplace over there, already has an SL20 toggle on its homepage… If this is anything to go by, then we could see the same thing happen on Blur and Opensea… well, maybe not Opensea. Those guys continue to take infinite Ls.

The way I look at it is similar to how LayerZero is the underlying infrastructure, and Stargate is an incredible demonstration of the underlying tech. Pandora is a great demonstration of the underlying ERC404 tech.

Anyway, that is enough from me; if you liked this, please consider subscribing below for all our free research, interviews, and content.

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