Gray Boys Beam Up with Proxy Wallet

We’ve seen fractionalized NFTs a few times. But beyond giving people a chance to trade parts of high-end NFTs, no one has really done much with the idea. Until now. Recently, the Gray Boys revealed their latest tech, the Proxy Wallet. The Proxy Wallet extension allows everyone holding a Gray Boy to act as if they also owned all the contents of the Proxy Wallet.

Gray Boys began as a 10k, PFP project, with a goal of building an NFT portfolio, shared by all Gray Boy holders. And so, over the last nine months, the Gray Boys have put together a portfolio of NFTs using the fees from market trades, and DAO governance to decide on the purchases. The goal was to acquire NFTs with utility, to potentially use when the proxy wallet was released.

And the Gray Boys DAO has built an impressive collection. It includes well-known NFTs such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, Proof Collective, and many, many more. Only some of the NFTs are in the proxy wallet at the moment. Most are still held in the DAO wallet.

The Proxy Wallet is a metamask type extension that allows anyone holding a Gray Boy, to pretend like they are also holding the contents of the Proxy wallet. So what good is partial ownership of an NFT?

Gray Boys Proxy Wallet

The Gray Boys Proxy Wallet extension was designed with the idea of allowing everyone in the DAO to utilize the NFTs held by the proxy wallet. Examples would be things like Icy Tools and Alpha Sharks, tools designed for those into flipping NFTS. Or gaining access to private Discord discussions that are gated by NFT ownership.

Interesting in theory. In practice, not so much. It turns out that those exclusive chat channels aren’t really that much different from any other chat. Sure, some NFT projects have ‘alpha call’ channels, though those are a dime a dozen nowadays.

A few folks have been able to access the NFT flipping tools. But so far, the biggest accomplishment seems to have been adding a Gray Boy drawing to the corner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club bathroom wall!

The concept has met with varied responses from other NFT projects. Many think the tech is cool, some think the idea is stupid, while others consider it theft. But overall, the reception has been relatively muted. Partly because the wallet is still in testing. Partly because accessing gated sites and Discord servers often don’t work well with multiple wallets trying to use the same NFT for access. Partially due to some of the projects actively blocking the Gray Boys proxy NFTs. And partly because, well, the utility from these NFTs isn’t really as special as they seem from the outside.

The community just passed a DAO proposal to let the Gray Boys devs sell and re-buy NFTs to get around blacklisting. But then it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole. With the projects banning specific NFTs, and the Gray Boys DAO purchasing a different one and trying again.

The tech itself is interesting. And it has future potential for uses such as loaning or borrowing NFTs (loaning an NFT to a museum or event for example) without transferring ownership. But I’m not so sure the Proxy Wallet will be as exciting as it seemed a few months ago.

Gray Boys Roadmap

The Gray Boys just released an updated roadmap for their project. And, in an interesting deviation from standard development practice, have put hard dates on this feature list that extends through the end of 2022!

The main item on the roadmap is what they call the Science Lab. Here Gray Boys owners will be able to utilize various potions and serums (and probably GRAY tokens as well) to create mutant NFTs. These won’t replace the original NFTs, but will be new creations based on the original Gray Boy that was used in the Lab.

They also plan to continue working on the Proxy Wallet to make it more robust and dynamically able to handle multiple users trying to access the same services through different wallets.

What are The Gray Boys?

The Gray Boys are a ‘gray alien’ themed Profile Picture Project with DAO governance over a community wallet. Gray Boys consists of 10,000 generated NFTs, released in November of 2021. Every Gray Boy owner automatically receives membership into the Mothership DAO. The DAO received 30% of the ETH from the initial mint sale and also receives any fees from secondary market sales. DAO members put forth proposals for spending ETH from this fund and vote on each.

The Gray Boys recently released the first version of their proxy wallet extension. This allows owners of Gray Boys to access exclusive features available only to holders of certain NFTs.

Gray Boys had a play to earn server on NFT Worlds before the Minecraft NFT ban.They plan to re-open once NFT Worlds gets their new game client up and running. The Gray Boys are also creating a Science Lab, allowing Gray Boy Holders to use various serums to create mutants.