Fans shell out $7M for unseen NFT collection
According to a recent NFT auction, inventors of nonfungible tokens (NFT) have poured about $7 million into a dutch auction that has sold 50 tokens conferring ownership over several digital artworks that are due minting in December 2021.
The artist of the popular NFT series Fidenza, Tyler Hobbs, is set to launch a 100 one-a-kind digital artworks among his latest collection Incomplete Control at the Bright Moments gallery in New York City between December 9 and December 13.
On October 22, Hobbs’ fans have reportedly contributed 1800 ETH (worth over $7 million) in exchange for 50 of 100 “Golden Tokens” that grant the respective holder ownership rights to one of the artworks scheduled to be minted during the event.
Each of the to-be-minted tokens features a number between 1 and 50 that correspond to a specific artwork from the collection.
The Golden Tokens have been sold via a dutch auction that was hosted by Mirror Protocol, lasting only 90 minutes. The tokens were originally priced at 500 ETH each, while the price was scheduled to decline by non-linear intervals in every 5 minutes gap until it reached a floor of 5 ETH. All the 50 tokens were eventually sold at prices between 30 Ether (approximately $120,000) and 80 Ether ($320,000) each.
The remainder of Golden Tokens would be distributed randomly to 50 of the wallets that presently hold artworks from Hobbs’ previous series Fidenza NFT project on November 5. Individuals who will receive the tokens are entitled to purchase an Incomplete Control NFT at for 15 ETH, a 50 per cent discount compared to the auction’s final clearing price.
Hobbs has described his Incomplete Control series as artworks that explore the themes of imperfection, signalling how the digital sphere has been able to transcend many imperfections present in the physical world.
Hobbs’ website has stated that “the forces of chaos and entropy” add a “certain warmth” into the natural world, generating “patterns and lessons” that we, as humans, can use to learn from. As per Hobbs, he liked “to introduce these elements into the digital world,” which is exactly the work that Incomplete Control continues doing.
Hobbs’ previous NFT series Fidenza consists of a curated drop of 999 NFTs that have unique generative artworks which are created using the purchaser’s transaction hash as data inputs. The collection has been sold for more than 37,000 ETH (about $400,000) and is being presented on the generative NFT platform, Art Blocks.
During September 2021, a Solana-based NFT project called SolBlocks had come under fire from Hobbs for using Fidenza’s open-sourced code for generating images for commercial purposes without the authorization of Hobbs.
Hobbs has since then rejected SolBlocks’ offer of sharing profits from their sales with him.
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