Gh0stly Gh0sts created by LayerZero: NFT ghosts traversing 7 chains

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

During the short holiday, if you have been hanging out in some active NFT communities, you are likely to have heard of a project called "Gh0stly Gh0sts."

Note: A screenshot of Gh0stly Gh0sts topping the OpenSea daily trading chart yesterday.

Gh0stly Gh0sts is a collection of ghost images with a total supply of 7,710, which was publicly minted for free on April 4. On April 5, it briefly surged to the top of the OpenSea daily trading chart, and the floor price (OpenSea, Ethereum) temporarily broke above 1 ETH. As of the time of writing, the floor price of Gh0stly Gh0sts (OpenSea, Ethereum) is reported at 0.494 ETH, with a historical total trading volume of 3,900 ETH.

Gh0stly Gh0sts positions itself as the first omnichain NFT, which differs from common custodial NFT cross-chain bridging solutions on the market (for example, the principle of Wormhole is to lock the NFT on the original chain and then issue a copy of the NFT on the target chain). Based on the cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero, Gh0stly Gh0sts achieves multi-chain issuance and allows for atomic cross-chain transfers between multiple chains.

Specifically, Gh0stly Gh0sts supports minting on seven different blockchains (Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, BSC, Avalanche, Fantom) from its inception. This means that the 7,710 ghosts will actually be distributed across seven different chains, so its true floor price needs to consider the market conditions of all seven chains (which is why we added "OpenSea, Ethereum" when discussing the floor price earlier).

Depending on their birthplace, the background colors of these ghost images will vary. As shown in the images below, ghosts born on Ethereum have a dark gray background, while those born on BSC have a yellow background.

Ghosts born on Ethereum

Ghosts born on BSC

Next comes the most critical cross-chain gameplay. Once a ghost is born on a certain chain, it can traverse between different chains directly through contracts, such as from Polygon to BSC, or from Avalanche to Ethereum. As shown in the image below, on OpenSea of the Ethereum mainnet, we can see many ghosts with colorful backgrounds, indicating that these ghosts come from different initial chains, where purple represents Polygon, blue represents Fantom, and red represents Avalanche. Now, these ghosts from different birthplaces have gathered on Ethereum (the border color indicates the current target chain, which is still dark gray for Ethereum).

It must be emphasized that these ghosts traversing to other blockchains are not copies of the original NFTs, but real NFTs recognized by the target chain's contracts. This is directly reflected in the fact that when we transfer a ghost from Avalanche to Ethereum, the total number of ghosts on Avalanche decreases by one, while Ethereum increases by one accordingly. Therefore, the supply of ghosts on different chains is actually dynamic.

So, how can I make my ghost travel across chains?

Since this feature is currently not available through a corresponding frontend and can only be executed at the contract level, Gh0stly Gh0sts provides a video tutorial for this purpose, which can be referenced in the "Portal".

It is worth mentioning that to handle transactions on the target chain, the ghost's cross-chain travel requires an upfront gas fee that is slightly higher than usual, and any unused gas will be refunded after the transaction is confirmed.

Overall, Gh0stly Gh0sts is undoubtedly an interesting attempt in the realm of NFT cross-chain capabilities, and it opens up new possibilities for NFT gameplay. On one hand, the multi-chain issuance of Gh0stly Gh0sts provides a new approach to solving gas wars; when the gas on the Ethereum mainnet is too high, users can choose other blockchains and transfer back to Ethereum when gas prices drop (often, there is no need to transfer back). On the other hand, the atomic cross-chain transfer of NFTs also brings greater interoperability and composability, allowing us to envision a brighter future for NFTs.