[imagesource: Yat Labs]

Forget emoji pillows, phone cases, slippers, bottles, T-shirts, socks, undies and so on and so forth, because now you can buy the real deal.

Yep, people are spending their hard-earned cash, often up to tens of thousands of dollars, to buy their favourite emojis, which they can then use and own forever.

The company in charge of the sales is Yat, built by blockchain protocol company Tari Labs, which sells strings of emoji as, well, a Yat:

“Imagine being known as 🔥🐍 or 🤖👻👑 instead of coffeequeen98 or jake2456@emailxyz.com,” explains the team behind the project.

“By owning a Yat – let’s say 🌊🔱🌴 – it’s yours forever. You are the ~only~ one on earth who owns these emojis.”

Mashable has more:

Built on the belief that the familiar cute icons will supplant traditional online handles, the currently invite-only Yat marketplace offers investors a chance to lock in their emoji of choice now — before it’s too late.

A Yat basically puts all your online handles into one combination of emoji, which you can then use for communication, payments, or whatever else:

On the technical side, all you need to know is that it includes blockchains:

With the goal of moving Yats onto the blockchain (more on that later), Yats offer, at least in theory, a censorship-resistant form of pseudonymous identity for the internet era.

Instead of sending bitcoin or monero to a long cryptocurrency address, the argument goes, you could send it to 🌊💨☁️💦.

One Yat owner, a Canadian man in his late forties working in the video game industry, explained the appeal:

“I’ve always been fascinated with online identities and frustrated with having to recreate my same username and image on so many different sites, in so many different games etc. that the idea of a single online identity that ‘just works’ feels a bit like the Holy Grail to me,” he wrote.

He has collected Yats and estimated that in total he’s spent between $8 000 and $10 000 on Yats.

In order to try and prevent Yat being a short-lived online craze, the company has some high-profile folk advocating for the idea, too.

This includes rapper Lil Wayne, who has a Yat in his Twitter profile (👽🎵.y.at), along with Wiz Khalifa (🤑💨.y.at).

Of course, there are many others out there, despite the Yat marketplace being invite-only.

More tired than curious to see where this one goes.

[source:mashable]