Gray Boys Beam Up with Proxy Wallet – Play to Earn

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…