Over the previous yr, $EGT hasn’t seen a lot progress, in accordance to knowledge from tracker CoinMarketCap, however its founders hoped the Musk statue would encourage the entrepreneur to tweet concerning the firm and convey new publicity to the token.
Elon GOAT Token’s efforts to ship the statue landed the corporate on Twitter’s U.S. trending web page. Musk bought the social community final month, inflicting an upheaval with mass layoffs, departed advertisers and potential modifications to the technique of acquiring a Twitter Blue examine mark.
Costing a total of $600,000, in accordance to Elon GOAT Token, the Musk sculpture is a nod to the billionaire’s fame — a rocket representing SpaceX, the spacecraft firm Musk based; and the literal goat, a phrase that can be used as an acronym for the phrase “Greatest Of All Time.”
Despite exponential progress in current years, cryptocurrency has had a tough 2022. FTX, the cryptocurrency trade that was estimated to be price $32 billion in January, collapsed this month. Its CEO resigned, and the corporate filed for chapter, prompting an investigation into how the enterprise got here undone.
In the previous yr, hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in cryptocurrency have been stolen in scams concentrating on customers of trade operator Coinbase.
Although for Elon GOAT Token “times have not been good,” co-founder Ashley Sansalone mentioned Saturday in a Twitter audio stream, the corporate had earmarked sufficient cash to full the statue mission.
“We believe that Elon’s potential acceptance of this biblical sized gift could catapult $EGT into the limelight and accelerate its various initiatives,” the corporate mentioned on its web site.
Elon GOAT Token didn’t reply to The Washington Post’s request for remark Saturday.
After months of development and journey throughout the nation, the statue arrived on the Austin constructing, Elon GOAT Token confirmed in a tweet Saturday after live-streaming the occasion. Musk, who has 119 million followers on Twitter, had not publicly acknowledged the mission as of Saturday night. Tesla didn’t reply to The Post’s request for remark Saturday.
Kevin Stone, a sculptor primarily based in Canada, mentioned he acquired a name concerning the mission final yr from its designer, Danny Wang, who didn’t disclose the id of whoever had commissioned the statue till after the contract was signed.
At first, Stone thought the thriller consumer was Musk himself. He didn’t assume anybody else would have commissioned such a “crazy project.”
The sculptor started work on the pinnacle of the piece in January and completed it almost six months later, after about 600 hours of labor. The sculpture of Musk’s head itself ended up six toes tall and 4 toes broad, weighing 250 kilos.
For Stone, who is understood for his sculptures of birds and dragons, the mission was the possibility to do one thing he’d by no means executed.
“It was so crazy I couldn’t turn it down,” he mentioned. “I just wanted to be a part of it just because it was such a unique opportunity to do something that was really, really different.”
Spectacle, a U.S. design and fabrication firm, designed the goat and rockets on the statue.
On Saturday night, Sansalone began a Twitter audio stream, saying he and people who had accompanied him for the journey have been sitting about 150 toes away from the Gigafactory, the place safety had requested them to relocate for security causes.
Sansalone mentioned that the Elon GOAT Token statue was all the time “supposed to be fun,” meant to make Musk chortle, and that the crypto firm was making an attempt to do the identical factor because the Tesla CEO, regardless of being “small in comparison.”
As the solar started to set in Austin on Saturday, it was unclear whether or not Musk would permit the statue to keep.
“We’re not leaving,” Sansalone mentioned close to the tip of the stream. “We’re going to see how this goes. We’re going to wait here.”
In the background of the Twitter audio stream, folks might be heard yelling: “Elon Musk, let’s go! Elon Musk, let’s go!”