Art Block’s Fidenza Creator Sells $17M in Ethereum NFTs Amid Market Decline
by James · September 28, 2022
In short
- QQL, a new generative art project from Tyler Hobbs and Dandelion Wist, sold nearly $17 million worth of NFTs today.
- Hobbs is the creator of the Art Blocks project, Fidenza, which has seen several individual NFT sales over $1 million since its launch last year.
The NFT the market – which broader cryptocurrency market— may be in a serious slump right now, but that didn’t stop artist Tyler Hobbs from cashing in on his latest generative artifice.
Hobbs, creator of the valuable Art Blocks Fidenza project, just made his anticipated debut QQL project. The Ethereum The NFT collection is a collaboration with Dandelion Wist, co-founder of the art platform Archipelago that launched the NFTs.
The project quickly sold out, with 900 NFT records being sold for 14 ETH (about $18,600) apiece, ultimately bringing in about $16.7 million from the primary sale. An additional 99 mint passes were reserved by the creators for “surprise collaborations,” according to the official website.
Each pass, which can now be traded on secondary markets, enables the holder to create one QQL bit – which can be customized via Hobb’s interactive algorithm – as an NFT. Anyone can play with the QQL algorithm and generate artwork, but only coin pass holders will actually be able to turn them into NFTs that are part of the official collection.
The QQL case took a unique approach to pricing. It is a modified Dutch auction that started at 50 ETH (about $66,500), with the price gradually ticking down over time. But when the auction ended with the final NFT pass being sold for 14 ETH, it effectively set the price for everyone. Anyone who initially paid a higher price can claim a refund for the difference.
An NFT is a blockchain token that represents ownership of a unique item, including digital goods such as artwork, collectibles, and video game items. Generative blockchain artwork is typically performed via an artist-created algorithm distributed on a network such as Ethereum, which produces a unique piece of artwork each time an NFT is minted.
Art blocks is the most famous generative art project in the NFT world, with over $1.3 billion to date value of sales on the secondary market. Hobbs, meanwhile, is one of the most popular artists of any kind working in the NFT space.
His Fidenza project on the Art Blocks platform has generated several seven-figure sales on the secondary market, including one that sold for $3.3 million in ETH in August 2021. Pseudonymous NFT collector Punk6529 purchased that piece, one of 999 unique NFTs in the collection.
Currently, the cheapest Fidenza piece listed on a secondary market is selling for 96 ETH, or about $127,600. Hobbs also released a subsequent Art Blocks project called Incomplete Control, which spans just 100 NFT pieces and starts at 110, 69 ETH (about $147,100) on the OpenSea market. Incomplete control discussed a live minting experience with Hobbs.
Despite high valuations for Hobbs’ work, the NFT market has seen falling prices and sales volume in recent months, paralleling the broader crypto market crash that began in May. Top marketplace OpenSea, for example, has only logged 319 million dollars worth of Ethereum NFT traded so far in September, compared to nearly $5 billion back in January.
