For better or for worse, NFT Open Editions is on the rise

The rise of the open edition (OE) is officially here. Growing in popularity throughout 2022, the past few months have seen thousands of artists and Web3 builders create open source claim sites. The NFT community has flocked to them, generating millions in revenue and reinvigorating the crypto art space as it tries to shake off the icicles in an icy 2022. Beyond the financial promise, OEs benefit the NFT ecosystem by driving engagement, allowing an artist’s fan base more opportunities to collect their work while expanding the community’s reach at the same time.

All of this sounds like good news—and it is, depending on who you ask. While some celebrate open editions, others worry that they ultimately damage the space, dilute the value of an artist’s output (especially their 1-of-1s) and bring little to collectors in terms of utility. There is also the question of the unknown long-term effects that OEs have on a work group.

To analyze these concerns and understand why open editions have begun their dizzying rise, we looked at the numbers and spoke to some of the artists and collectors who know the OE trend best. But first it is worth understanding the historical context behind this upswing.

How did open editions become so popular?

Open issues are NFT drops with no set supply limit, allowing collectors to mint as many tokens as they want within a certain period of time (usually within 24, 48 or 72 hours). They can also be open, with no time limit, although these are somewhat less common. The open issue itself is not a particularly new drop methodology in the NFT space (Beeple famously dropped three open issues on the Nifty Gateway in 2020, for example), but the sheer volume of OEs that have appeared on the radar recently is unique. Countless artists have joined the OE rush in recent weeks and months, including Terrell Jones, Lucreceand Marcel Deneuve. And their coins are mostly met with enthusiasm from the communities and fans.

This rise in popularity can be partially attributed to two things: the spread of democratic coining infrastructure from such platforms as Manifold and Zora through 2022 and well-known artists experimenting with open issues in the same year. Following XCOPY’s landmark $23 million “MAX PAIN” open edition in March 2022, such experiments include Alpha Centauri Kid, Grant Riven Yun and Isaac ‘Drift’ Wright, the NFT photographer who dropped First Day Out in April 2022 as a 24-hour open edition to commemorate his release from prison a year earlier.

This decline sparked an ongoing conversation about utility in the NFT space and whether or not artist pieces—whether OE, 1-of-1, or limited editions—need to have an additional value or application to collectors beyond simply being an artistic piece. work. It also made people reconsider how such drops would affect the prices and value of a famous artist’s unique 1-of-1 work.

Behind the rise: Manifold’s claims pages and Zora’s editions

Drift released its open edition on Manifold, a coining platform that may be the most meaningful contributor to the spread of the open edition in recent months. First Day Out was marked on Drift’s customized Manifold smart contract. The release likely helped influence the platform’s decision to develop a way for NFT community members without coding knowledge to easily do the same. Manifold’s goal has always been to give Web3 community members access to tools they can use to create custom drop experiences for their communities. While larger platforms like OpenSea had launched similar “storefront” features in years past, they were significantly limited in what artists could do with their drops.

Manifold’s main impact on the OE movement came when it was launched Pages with paid claims in October 2022. An extension of the Claim Pages functionality that allows artists to set up pages for free coin drops, Paid Claim Pages allowed users to launch a limited and open edition drop page for ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens, just like Drift had done earlier that year. The result? Currently, over 16,000 claims have been created by over 6,000 users on the platform, giving out nearly 15,000 ETH ($20 million) in total primary sales volume, according to Dune’s analytics dashboard.

Zora is another NFT marketplace protocol that, along with Manifold, has played a significant role in the OE craze. For those unfamiliar with the name, Zora was the platform that artist and designer Jack Butcher chose to launch his now well-known NFT project Checks VV. Since launching the Creator Toolkit in May 2022 and provides users with a code-free way to create and release NFT collections, nearly 240,000 unique wallet addresses have created an issue of some kind, either fixed-size or open-ended.

And while the majority of the more than 8,500 contracts deployed on the platform have been for declines in fixed issues, this ratio is quickly beginning to swing in the other direction. Of the 1,525 total ETH primary sales volume that Zora’s Creator Toolkit has generated since its release (along with over 16,000 ETH in secondary sales), over half can be attributed to OE drops, according to Zora’s Dune analytics dashboard. Combine that with a clear statistical shift in the type of collection users create on the platform starting in January of this year, and it’s clear that the open edition has hit a tipping point.

What artists and collectors say

Not everyone is completely on board with open edition fever.

“It’s a free market for artists, buyers and collectors to do as they please,” said influential NFT collector, influencer and Web3 builder 33NFT of the popularization of open edition in an interview with nft now. “However, an artist can sell too many editions – thousands or more – which, in my opinion, can end up causing headaches, as the artist and the buyer usually want to see the post-sale price increase or at least remain stable above the original mint price. It comes across as an afterthought when an artist announces a few months later that there will be a burn event, or that very large editions can be used as purchase tokens to submit in exchange for a 1-of-1 artwork.”

The collector referenced Beeple’s 2020 open edition release with the Nifty Gateway as an example of an OE done right. During this decline, Bull Run, Infected and Into The Ether sold for $969 each. In 33’s eyes, the relatively high price and resulting low volume of the OE drop struck a good balance between accessibility and value preservation rather than coming across as something like an artist’s initial coin offering (ICO).

“In general, I wouldn’t recommend any artist drop an open edition until their 1-of-1s have become unaffordable for most people,” continued 33. “There should also be a good reason for the open edition. I would much rather see a limited edition of 50, 100 or 1000 if the artist so desires. But I like to know what that number is.”

In contrast, some artists take the space by surprise at the idea of ​​scarcity. Visual artist and sci-fi futurist Marcel Deneuve believes that open editions can be a great way to keep the NFT community healthy balanced, ensuring that it’s not just community members with deep pockets and expensive 1-of-1s dominating the space.

“1-of-1 is for a very specific group of people; only a few can actually afford it,” said Deneuve while speaking to nft now. “But there are a lot of fans who want to get collectibles and support their favorite artists. This was the main reason I started making OE.”

Deneuve has marked several NFTs at Manifold in recent weeks, and in his view the community response has been a success. Like other collectors and artists in the space he talks to, Deneuve isn’t committed to any type of release, but thinks it’s worth exploring options that his collectors are asking for.

“As long as people ask me to do it, it’s a success,” Deneuve stressed. “I will continue to do both types of drops, but my focus is definitely on OE. While too much supply is bad for artists, I think the concept of scarcity is a bit overrated.”

The future of the open edition

Some artists are wary of the unforeseen effects open editions can have. Featured NFT artist and photographer Cath Simard recently took to Twitter to express both her interest in and hesitation about the open edition, with an ambivalent tone likely to resonate with many other artists in the room. Corresponding minimalist artist and NFT figurehead Grant Riven Yun has said that he believes a higher number or low-priced 1-of-1 is superior to a large number of an edition of a single piece for both artists and collectors.

33NFT advocates that society looks at open editions on a case-by-case basis. The evolution of the NFT space is unlikely to resemble how it grew in the past, and what works for one artist may not work for another.

“It really depends on where an artist is in their career,” elaborated 33. “I think most people would rather own a 1-of-1. At the time, XCOPY sold 1-of-1 artwork on SuperRare for around $100, and he fully deserves to be where he is today. But now newer NFT artists will rarely sell 1-of-1s for that much and want more notable dollars faster. If they don’t yet have that requirement, they might think that they can pay their bills with an OE.”

As open releases continue to grow as a dynamic in the ever-evolving NFT ecosystem, artists should keep a careful eye on the long-term effects they can have, but not be afraid to use them. That the space is experimenting with OEs is healthy in itself. As a collector, it’s best not to create an open edition with an eye toward it becoming an extremely valuable asset, either immediately or sometime down the line.

The concept of offering when it comes to value in art is nothing new, like many have pointed out. NFTs enable artists to interact with their collectors in previously impossible ways, so it was inevitable that this age-old debate in the traditional art world would translate to Web3. How artists choose to navigate that is up to them, but both praising open editions as a silver bullet solution to weather market conditions and crippling them as a damaging and dilutive force for collectors are myopic lenses through which to see change in an industry that is built on innovation.