Is NFT issuing a new paradigm? Analyzing Zombie Club's anti-scientist tactics, adopting declaration terms

The highly anticipated Asian think tank-style NFT Zombie Club recently completed its public sale on the 17th, starting at a price of 0.666 ETH, which has now risen to nearly 3 ETH at the time of writing. The project collaborated with the blockchain company Teahouse for smart contract development, and Teahouse's founder, Fenix Hsu, has previously published several articles on how to distribute NFTs more fairly. When launching, Zombie Club successfully avoided the criticism of "scientists minting first." How did they achieve this? In addition, Zombie Club also made a rare compliance statement for minting and may become a paradigm for future NFT development.

Did Scientists Disappear?

One of the things NFT players are most concerned about is the "fairness of initial minting." While everyone is looking for opportunities to mint early, if a "scientist" or any other party mints a large amount of NFTs ahead of others, it will shake the community.

Scientist Definition: Someone who knows how to analyze smart contract functions in various ways and understands the principles of transaction sending. By doing so, they can interact directly with the blockchain to gain an advantage when operating contracts without being affected by the website's front end.

Twitter user @nelsonie analyzed the methods used by Zombie Club to prevent scientists from taking advantage. According to developer interviews, the key lies in the "unpublished contract code," preventing scientists from gaining an advantage.

@nelsonie stated that although ZombieClub Token ZCT has a contract address on Etherscan 0x9c80777cae192e5031c38a0d951c55730ecc3f5e, the code has not been uploaded. Therefore, scientists cannot find functions related to whitelists and public sales for minting through Etherscan, allowing users to mint ahead of others through the front-end website.

This practice is not customary in the Ethereum protocol. In token issuance and DeFi fields, asset security is crucial. A basic step taken by development teams is to verify the smart contract on Etherscan and make the code content public to reassure users. Founder of The Z Institute, Li Tingting, mentioned that without this step, smart contract code cannot be directly displayed on the Etherscan front end, and scientists will not know how to call the contract using scripts.

Blockchain engineer Zhu Xixi explained that when writing smart contracts, they are written in plain text. Once uploaded to the blockchain, they become encrypted. These undisclosed smart contracts can be attempted to be uncovered through a third-party website's "decompilation" to find the code content.

Li Tingting, founder of The Z Institute, explained to us that the built-in database of the decompiler is like a large library of open-source contracts. It searches for past function names to analyze smart contracts. The key minting function of the Zombie Club smart contract was not found in the decompilation results, possibly due to a change in function names.

@nelsonie also analyzed that the contract's "unknown96cf73cf" could be the minting function. Rex, founder of Fuly.ai, stated that this function likely requires signature verification for execution, tailored for the minting action.

@nelsonie mentioned that this signature must be obtained by passing a real person verification reCAPTCHA on the Zombie official website to call the "unknown96cf73cf" function for minting. Only whitelist participants can obtain the signature before the public sale.

@nelsonie concluded that although signature verification is a centralized method and cannot guarantee that the issuer will not abuse privileges, it seems to be the best way to prevent scientists compared to any decentralized solutions.

Rex, founder of Fuly.ai, believes that whether to disclose smart contracts is a topic worth discussing. Most DApps are anonymous, and it's unclear who created them. To verify that a team is operating as claimed, users must look at the smart contract. Establishing trust in a protocol relies on the absence of issues in smart contracts. By not disclosing their smart contract, Zombie Club adopted a more opaque, centralized approach to prevent scientists and create fairness, which is beneficial for the community interested in participating but may conflict with decentralization principles. This case places trust in the hands of the development team to prevent cheating and create a fair environment, ultimately benefiting consumers.

However, there were some incidents during the public offering. Based on on-chain records, several transactions incurred high Gas Fees but were unsuccessful. According to current statements: "The contract does not control the gas limit. If a bot is used, an old version of the wallet, or deliberately adjusting MetaMask with the gas limit from the whitelist period, it is likely to fail. Therefore, it is more likely to succeed by slowly increasing with a normal MetaMask." For the official announcement, please refer to here

Adoption of Statement Terms

In financial products, derivatives trading, token issuance, and other products, many issuers provide complete statement terms based on relatively mature regulatory discussions. However, compliance and investor protection awareness are still relatively rare in the NFT field, operating more similarly to early ICOs.

However, Zombie Club has already addressed issues such as "jurisdiction," "professional investor risk awareness," "securities fundraising activities," and "intellectual property rights" in the statements displayed during minting. Although the NFT regulatory framework is not yet complete, Zombie Club seems to be prepared for future developments, making them one of the few teams with compliance risk awareness.