Key Takeaways
- Fidenza artist Tyler Hobbs has sold $7 million worth of “Golden Tokens,” which serve as claims on yet-to-be-minted generative art NFTs.
- The artwork will be minted at a “minting event” in New York City this December.
- Buyers must be physically present at the event to redeem their NFTs.
Fidenza artist Tyler Hobbs has sold $7M worth of digital art that is not scheduled to exist until December. Even then, buyers will have to be physically present to redeem their artwork.
“The Forms of Things Unknown”
Tyler Hobbs, the artist behind Fidenza, has raised over $7 million by selling “Golden Tokens,” or NFTs redeemable for art that does not exist. Yet.
The sale is part of Incomplete Control, Hobbs’ new generative art project through Art Blocks. Art Blocks is a carefully curated NFT marketplace through which users can purchase “iterations” of an artist’s work, each of which is minted as a new ERC-721 non-fungible token at the time of purchase. Each new NFT contains unique “seed” variables in its generative script that control outputs such as color, height, depth, and so on. In other words, the unique piece of art the user is purchasing does not actually exist until it is already purchased, at which point is generated and sent to the buyer’s wallet.
The new NFTs will be minted at an in-person “minting event” at Bright Moments Gallery in New York City from Dec. 9 to 12, 2021. Holders of Golden Tokens must be present at this event in order to redeem their tokens for the new artwork. While there will be 100 Golden Tokens in total, only 50 Golden Tokens were sold in today’s Dutch auction.
Each Token auction lasted 90 minutes, and the price decreased every five minutes, descending from a price of 500 ETH down to 5 ETH. The first and second Golden Tokens each sold for 80 ETH, while the third and fourth sold for 70 and 40 ETH, respectively. The rest sold at either 35 ETH or 30 ETH.
The other 50 tokens will be available for purchase at a fixed price 50% lower than the last price of today’s Dutch auction. Therefore, the discounted fixed price will be 15 ETH. The option to buy the remaining tokens will be distributed to a random selection of Fidenza and Crypto Citizen holders, with one reserved for Bright Moments and one for Tyler Hobbs.
Hobbs says Incomplete Control is “a more focused work” than his previous project, Fidenza, which he described at the time as his “most versatile generative algorithm to date.” In a tweet today, Hobbs shared a glimpse into his artistic vision for Incomplete Control, writing, “this work is about imperfection, time, and continuous space.” Going deeper on the project, Hobbs wrote that he likes to bring imperfection to the digital world, which tends to be relatively lacking in the “forces of chaos and entropy” that give “the natural world a certain warmth.”
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.
