Basic info
Last updated: Sep 21, 2023
Meebits is an NFT collection of 20,000 unique 3D voxel characters created by Larva Labs. A voxel is essentially a 3D pixel, and each Meebit is generated through a custom algorithm. In addition to the digital art aspect, Meebits also has its own built-in marketplace where users can trade these unique characters.
In March 2022, Yuga Labs – the company behind the popular BAYC NFT collection, acquired the Meebits Intellectual Property (IP) rights for Meebits, along with Cryptopunks. Following that Yuga Labs distributed the IP rights to NFT holders, therefore currently each Meebits holder owns the rights to their own NFT.
Meebits was unveiled to the public in May 2021. The launch consisted of a Dutch auction, which started at a mint price of 2.5 ETH and decreased incrementally until all 9,000 initial NFTs were sold. The remaining 11,000 NFTs were distributed for free to owners of CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs, Larva Labs' other NFT projects.
The collection consists of 20,000 unique Meebits NFTs. Interestingly, there is no creator fee for any transactions involving these digital assets. These characters are divided into seven distinct types - dissected, visitor, skeleton, robot, elephant, pig, and human.
The Meebits smart contract takes upon the popular ERC-721 token standard, it is launched on the Ethereum blockchain and is available for everyone to check. There is no Meebits artist as the NFTs were created algorithmically. Even though the generator was run before the minting, the team behind Larva Labs – the creators of Meebits, claimed that since the Meebits smart contract assigns completely random mint numbers, no one was able to predetermine which NFT they would get at mint.
The Meebits rarity ranking depends on the traits present in each NFT. The rarest of traits is named “Tattoo” and there are 994 of it, while the most common ones are “Shoes”, “Pants”, “Hair”, and “Shirt” each of which has 20,000 variants.
Since the launch of the project, the team behind it has been working on bringing more value to it, by creating the MeebitsDAO – whose main goal is “to create a vehicle for funding innovative projects that will develop the ecosystem around Meebits”. In order to take part in the organization, users need to mint a so-called General Membership token, with a mint prize of 0.05 ETH limited at 1 token per wallet address. With it holders gain access to the MeebitsDAO Discord server where they can participate in the governance of the organization.
Besides being split among seven types, the Meebits NFT collection has twenty attributes consisting of more than 1,000 Meebits traits.
Larva Labs, the company which created the Meebits NFT collection, was founded by John Watkinson and Matt Hall. Being programmatically generated, the collection has no artist.
The project was later acquired by Yuga Labs, the company behind the popular BAYC NFT collection. There are no controversies surrounding the team members.
The Meebits community is vibrant and active, with a dedicated Discord channel facilitated by MeebitsDAO.
While there are no official partnerships, Meebits is part of the Yuga Labs ecosystem. MeebitsDAO has also engaged in numerous collaborations, primarily focusing on merchandise.
As stated by Larva Labs, creating a generator algorithm for voxel characters proved to be “a lot more challenging” than creating one for 2D characters (such is the method behind the generation of CryptoPunks for example). Furthermore, the team also created an asset pack available for each Meebits NFT allowing its owner to take a “T-pose” (T-pose in digital animation refers to a stand-up body position with arms stretched sideways) therefore making it available for use in any videogame engine, 3D studio, or virtual world supporting the rigging of avatars for animation.
The asset pack provided to Meebits NFT holders also includes high-resolution, lossless renders of the images in it, allowing them to set it as their 2D profile picture on various platforms. However, the main Meebits value envisioned with the creation of the collection is having the Meebits NFTs used as 3D avatars for virtual worlds, games, and VR platforms in various Metaverse projects.
Soon after the launch of the collection, the Meebits smart contract was exploited by an attacker, named “xNietzsche” on Twitter. As they shared, the smart contract allowed them to “reroll” their Meebit mints until the contract gave them the one they wanted. This was made possible since the Meebits smart contract included a zipped IFPS file revealing the characteristic of each NFT’s ID. Since the IDs of Meebits were public knowledge the only thing the attacker needed was information regarding the characteristics. Once that was gained through the IFPS file – the attacker created a smart contract that minted Meebits over and over but canceled each transaction if it didn’t include their favorable ID. Once the exploit was noticed, Larva Labs shut down the minting.
However, by that time the attacker managed to obtain Meebit #16647 which was then sold to famous NFT collector Pransky for 200 ETH. According to the attacker’s own estimation, the exploit could have been far more fruitful, as they should have gotten at least two high-value NFTs for the time they spent on the attack. Nevertheless, the gas fees required for the attack were estimated to have been around $20,000 per hour and to make the minting possible, the attacker also had to buy CryptoPunks NFTs with unredeemed Meebits NFTs in order to take part in the minting. Later the attacker said the exploit has cost them 50 ETH and 5 floor-price CryptoPunks NFTs.
Meebits was audited by code4rena in May 2021. The audit found six high-risk issues. The first one would impact compatibility with NFT platforms expecting full conformity with the ERC-721 token standard, as its index is supposed to start at 0, however, the implementation in the audited smart contract required the indexer to be greater than 0. The second issue, although mitigated by the original smart contract, provided grounds for replay attacks (a replay attack is one where a malicious party intercepts messages and then resends them) if the contract’s logic was to be changed at a later point. The third issue allowed an arbitrary transfer of any NFT not owned by any address.
The fourth issue would allow an attacker to complete a malicious trade in specific circumstances described in the audit. The fifth high-risk issue would make the last token from a list invalid due to the NFT index starting at 0, as per the ERC-721 standard, however, the Meebits smart contract starts indexing at 1. The final high-risk issue allowed NFTs to be minted for free after the token sale has ended, according to the auditors, due to lack of documentation it wasn’t clear if the behavior that allowed the exploit was intentional or not. If intentional the issue would have allowed an attacker to create a smart contract and claim all remaining NFTs front-running regular users.
While there is no official roadmap, MeebitsDAO aims to broaden the utility of these digital characters in various Metaverse projects.
Meebits can be acquired from various marketplaces such as OpenSea, Rarible, and its own marketplace. The current floor price for a Meebits NFT is approximately 1 ETH ($1,620 at the time of writing), with the most expensive Meebit recently sold for 95 ETH.
https://www.larvalabs.com/project/meebits
https://etherscan.io/token/0x7bd29408f11d2bfc23c34f18275bbf23bb716bc7
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Last updated: Sep 21, 2023
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