The craze around non-fungible tokens (NFT) is still going strong. Every week, new works of art are being snapped up at a premium, whether they are newly created or older. The Art Blocks platform takes this world even further.
Art Blocks: the new spearhead of NFT
Launched in November 2020, Art Blocks is an NFTs platform based on the generation of artistic content via algorithms. In concrete terms, artists publish an algorithm for generating works on the platform. This algorithm is stored immutably on the Ethereum blockchain. However, at this stage, the work itself is not yet created.
When a collector wants to buy one of these works, a random key called seed is generated and will determine the attributes of the work. In effect, this seed controls both the design of the work and the colors that compose it.
Therefore, neither the buyer nor the creator can know in advance what the works in a series will look like. This eliminates any possibility of manipulating the system and allows each buyer to mine a rare work.
The artist, on the other hand, can determine the number of works that can be generated thanks to the algorithm he or she has published on the platform, as well as the initial price of each work. The artist will then receive a 5% royalty on each sale on the secondary market. The platform, for its part, collects 10% on the initial sale, then 2.5% per sale on the secondary market.
Finally, the teams of the Art Blocks platform keep the choice of the algorithms used, as its official website explains:
“Artists/creators are selected to deploy projects at the sole discretion of the Art Blocks team. We reserve the right to select content for the platform without explanation. That said, no content that could be considered even remotely offensive to anyone will be considered.”
Prices soaring… as usual?
Once is not usual in the NFT universe, the price of these works has increased insanely.
Thus, the work “Fidenza #313”, initially sold by the artist Tyler Hobbs for 0.58 ETH, has just been resold for the modest sum of 1,000 ETH, or about 3.3 million dollars at the time of sale. This represents a 172,413% increase in value in ETH for the Internet user who bought it.
This work is part of a series of 999 works generated by the same algorithm, but each based on a different seed. To date, 313 is the highest-rated work in the series. However, other works in the series, such as 723 and 529, have sold for 650 and 500 ETH respectively, or $2.1 million and $1.6 million.
The Fidenza series is not the only one from Art Blocks that has attracted the interest of collectors. Chromie Squiggle #3784 was acquired on August 14 by collector Zoomc for 750 ETH, although it was originally offered for free.
Other NFT projects, although much less attractive on paper, have also attracted the interest of collectors. This is the case of EtherRocks, a series of NFTs featuring simple stones that sell for several hundred thousand dollars.
