6 days, 60x – Is Slonks Reviving NFTs by 'Drawing Wrong'?

Original author: Kuli, Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, the crypto market seems to be warming up, with some established sectors also beginning to introduce innovative gameplay, such as the long-dormant NFT space.

On May 1st, an NFT series called Slonks launched on Ethereum. The mint price was less than 0.004 ETH, which is roughly under seventy RMB.

Six days later, the floor price is 0.123 ETH, an increase of approximately 60 times. The 7-day volume on OpenSea is 586 ETH, with over 23,000 transactions. The total supply is 10,000 pieces; 1,348 have already been permanently burned, leaving 8,642 in circulation.

How do these numbers stack up in the 2026 NFT market? In the same week, the eight-year-old blue-chip CryptoPunks completed a total of 20 transactions. Slonks completed 23,000 transactions.

And at 9 PM tonight, this project is launching a token called $SLOP.

If you search for Slonks on Twitter, you'll find an interesting phenomenon. Almost everyone says this project has "ingenious mechanisms" and "a self-consistent design," but when you ask them to explain exactly how it works, most people get stuck after saying "images can be swapped for tokens, and tokens can be swapped for images"...

Some call it GameFi, on-chain AI art experimentation, or an evolved version of CryptoPunks; others say it’s essentially a game of "fusion pets from Fantasy Westward Journey."

After a quick research, I think these descriptions all touch on it, but none quite hit the mark.

The truly interesting aspect of Slonks might be turning a very counterintuitive idea into a business. That idea is: What AI gets wrong is more valuable than what it gets right.

Why are AI's mistaken pixels valuable?

What sets this project apart from some previous NFTs is that its NFTs are not image files.

Traditional NFTs usually store a finished image on an off-chain server, with only a link placed in the contract. Slonks is different; it embeds an AI image generation model directly into the Ethereum smart contract. The entire model is only 214KB, roughly the size of a low-resolution phone wallpaper.

Every time someone views a Slonk, the contract runs the model inference on-the-fly, generating the image in real-time.

It doesn't store images, only the ability to draw them. This is essentially a micro-innovation in NFT gameplay.

So, what exactly is this model drawing?

In fact, it's copying... The model's task is to draw a replica for each of the 10,000 original CryptoPunk images. Each CryptoPunk corresponds to one Slonk. The model looks at the original and tries to redraw it using the same color palette.

But a 214KB model trying to remember 10,000 faces is quite a stretch.

Each image has a total of 576 pixels. On average, the model gets about 24 pixels wrong, meaning roughly 4% of each image differs from the original. Only 32 out of 10,000 are perfectly replicated; the rest carry varying degrees of "distortion."

The project calls these incorrectly drawn, distorted pixels "slop."

Zero mistakes mean slop is 0; if everything is wrong, slop is 576. The project's developer, Hirsch, summed up the project's attitude in one sentence on Twitter: "The slop is not a bug. It is the medium."

This means an AI model re-copies an old OG NFT project. But because it makes mistakes, and each mistake is different, it creates varying degrees of scarcity and speculative value.

Consequently, the entire economic model of the project is built on this logic: the more mistakes, the more valuable.

Slonk holders can perform an operation called Merge. Take two Slonks of the same level you hold, choose one to keep, and burn the other. The contract mixes the features of both images and has the model redraw a new one.

Because two different images are mixed together, the newly drawn result inevitably deviates more from the original CryptoPunk, not less.

With each Merge, slop only increases, never decreases. And the burned image is gone forever, reducing the total supply by one.

This is why, within six days of launch, over 1,300 out of 10,000 have been burned. Players keep merging, creating versions with higher slop while pushing the circulating supply smaller.

At this point, Slonks is already a fascinating on-chain art experiment, using an AI algorithm to create artificial scarcity.

$SLOP: Pricing every mistaken pixel

What truly turns this project into a business might be the official project token $SLOP, launching tonight.

Its purpose is to turn the "number of pixels drawn incorrectly" on each image into something tradeable.

How? Through an operation called Void.

Holders can send their Slonk into the Void. The NFT leaves circulation, and the contract mints an equivalent amount of $SLOP tokens for you at a 1:1 ratio based on the slop value of that image.

For example, if your image has a slop of 287, you get 287 $SLOP. If the slop is 450, you get 450 $SLOP.

This process isn't just stating a number. The contract requires you to first generate a ZK proof, verifying that the on-chain model's rendering result for that image is indeed what you claim. Only after verification passes, it mints the tokens.

In layman's terms, you must first "inspect the goods," proving that your image indeed has this many mistaken pixels, before the contract acknowledges it.

Slonks sent into the Void are not destroyed; they remain in the contract. This leads to the second operation: Revival.

By spending a certain amount of $SLOP, you can randomly retrieve one Slonk from the Void. You can't choose which one you get, and upon retrieval, the model redraws the image, which will likely look different from before.

Revival uses a Dutch auction pricing: starting at 576 $SLOP, decreasing by 1 per block, down to a minimum of 100. However, as soon as someone buys, the price instantly resets to 576 and starts dropping again. If you want a cheaper draw, you wait, but you risk being beaten to it by someone else at any moment.

Most revived images will be relatively close to the original CryptoPunk, with low slop. However, there's a 1% chance the model "goes completely crazy," producing an extreme version with slop over 400. This 1% is the lottery ticket.

By now, you've probably noticed that Void and Revival form an economic loop of "Image-Token Swapping":

1. Buy a high-slop Slonk cheaply, send it into the Void to exchange for tokens.
2. Wait for the token price to rise, then spend tokens to revive a new image.
3. If you get lucky and draw a high-slop one, send it back into the Void for more tokens.
4. Image to token, token to image, back and forth.

The project also designed an automatic flywheel: The $SLOP trading pool charges a 2% fee. Half of this fee is automatically used to purchase floor-priced Slonks from OpenSea, which are then sent into the Void as inventory for future revivals.

The more active the trading, the larger the Void inventory, the more items there are to revive.

Regarding tonight's token launch, Hirsch detailed the specific process a few hours ago. 576,000 $SLOP will be placed into a single-sided liquidity pool, with an initial market cap of approximately $50,000.

Buyers bring their own ETH to purchase. For the first 6 hours after launch, only tokens can be bought and sold; Void is not allowed. This means the first 6 hours are purely a price discovery period, allowing the market to price $SLOP first, after which the Void will be opened, truly enabling the conversion channel between NFTs and tokens.

The hard cap for $SLOP is 5,760,000, which equals 10,000 images multiplied by 576 pixels each. However, this number will never be fully minted because images burned through Merge do not generate any tokens. The slop from the over one thousand already burned images is permanently locked.

The author believes the most ingenious part of this design is that it binds "speculation" and "creation" into the same action.

When you Merge two images, you are speculating, because higher slop means more potential tokens. But you are also creating, because the model draws a brand new, never-before-seen 24x24 pixel image. You make money and engage in on-chain art using the same button, creating a positive feedback loop.

Therefore, this gameplay can be seen as a micro-innovative Ponzi economic structure in NFT's creation of scarcity, image-token swapping, and deflationary design.

An Inscription Veteran, Old Tricks for New Games

Not many in the community know much about Slonks' creator, Michael Hirsch, but he is no novice.

Remember ETHS on Ethereum during the previous inscription craze? The project had a peak market cap of about $420 million, and Hirsch was its founder.

After the inscription track cooled down, he turned to build Blockhash, a small studio focused on on-chain products, which has developed DEXs, NFT marketplaces, token-gated chat tools, and various things he describes as "weird crypto experiments."

Slonks is this studio's latest work.

A person who experienced the dramatic ups and downs of the inscription cycle choosing to launch a project with a very high understanding barrier now is, in itself, a noteworthy signal. Does it mean on-chain liquidity and market sentiment are recovering, leading to micro-innovations being hyped again?

I think it’s worth observing.

As mentioned, tonight at 9 PM, the $SLOP token launches. For the first six hours after launch, only tokens can be bought and sold; NFTs cannot be exchanged for tokens via Void. These six hours are a pure price discovery period with no new supply, where buyers price among themselves.

After six hours, the Void channel opens, and the two-way conversion between NFTs and tokens officially begins.

An initial market cap of $50,000 means extremely thin liquidity, and early price volatility will be very intense. The whitepaper still bears the label "v1 · draft."

This project has technical ingenuity, a proven founder, and a logically self-consistent economic loop. However, at its core, it is fundamentally about micro-innovation in economic models and the artificial creation of scarcity.

Veterans who have weathered several cycles will undoubtedly smirk at this kind of gameplay. But regardless, having something new in the current market climate is, I think, a good trend in itself.

DYOR.