Time Magazine recently launched a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) dubbed “TIMEPieces” representing artists’ achievements. However, as soon as the sale opened, the Ethereum network (ETH) became congested and this caused the transaction fees for a few minutes. Thus, a user had to pay nearly $70,000 in transaction fees to acquire NFTs.
$70,000 in transaction fees
On Thursday, September 23, Time Magazine launched a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing artists’ works.
Dubbed “TIMEPieces,” the collection consists of 4,676 NFTs with an initial price of 0.1 ETH, or about $310 at launch. TIME President Keith Grossman said:
“The TIMEPieces project demonstrates that a major media brand can embrace new technologies to build community and grow on digital subscriptions.”
The goal of this initiative is to encourage loyalty. As a result, the holder of one of these NFTs is entitled to a subscription to Time Magazine, to participate in various events and to access a variety of digital experiences.
Nevertheless, even though the NFTs sold out quickly the sale encountered some difficulties especially at the time of the event’s opening.
Indeed, the Ethereum network was jammed, increasing the average transaction fees for a moment. Thus, some buyers in a hurry had to spend, on average, almost 4 times more than for the NFTs themselves.
In this sense, one buyer had to spend nearly 22.60 ETH, or $70,200 in fees to buy a few NFTs from Time Magazine.
Theoretically, either the person rushed to buy the NFTs without checking the gas fees, or he explicitly set the gas at that level to make sure he wouldn’t miss the sale.
Either way, it is interesting to note that the transaction does not appear profitable. Indeed, at the time of writing, these NFTs are selling for an average of 0.9 ETH on the secondary market, or $3600 at the current price.
Although this is much higher than the cost of minting Time Magazine NFTs, the buyer could theoretically only get 9 ETH from the sale of his 10 NFTs. At this point, the buyer still has the NFTs in his possession, and is certainly hoping to sell them for much more to cover his losses.
Note also that this is not the first time this has happened to a user of the Ethereum network. For example, last February, a Uniswap user had to pay nearly $36,000 in fees to allow the protocol’s smart contract to interact with his wallet.
