This Week’s NFT Outliers — March 24th 2022
I could write one of these every single day with fresh content. Waiting a week to write ends up like drinking from a firehose. I had to corner co during a drive on an errand to give me “the top 3 or 4 things” happening right now. (If you’re wondering, the errand was to pick up a 2002 4Runner from my grandmother’s house.) He would have given me 100 if the drive was longer.
We’ll start off with some education and move into some killer things happening in the Tezos space right now. Feel free to skip ahead if you already know about minting. Also, a quick reminder to check out Outli3rs.xyz, enter your email to get our free educational content, and start your NFT journey.
For the newcomer: Minting 101
For the uninitiated, there are two main concepts to acquaint yourself with when it comes to building up a portfolio of NFTs: collecting and minting. Collecting is easy — you see a piece that you like, you pay money, it gets added to your collection. Bing bang boom. Congrats, you are now the next David Geffen.
The more interesting concept is that of “minting”. This, for the collector, effectively means: the NFT is generated at the moment you go to collect it. In all likelihood, you do not know exactly what it’s going to look like before you get it. In what is called “generative art”, an artist-programmer builds an NFT contract that creates a unique piece of art at the moment of collection. You click the Mint button, the NFT is created magically behind the scenes, you get that unique piece. Lots of interesting art comes that way.
Take a look at Astronomic Comics by KilledByAPixel / Frank Force. 512 pieces, each created at the time they were bought by someone.
Minting also applies to what artists do to get their art onto the blockchain, but we’ll tackle that concept at another time.
Another sick (sick being cool) example: Towers by ertdfgcvb.
fxhash is officially launching V1
It’s about to pop off on April 1st over at fxhash, Tezos’ most popular generative art platform. As far as I understand it — they are moving out of alpha/beta and into official Platform Version 1. What is going to happen at this point in time is that they will burn down all unminted art. This means that any works with outstanding options will simply be locked as-is. This is kind of wild for both investor and artist, as it will create some additional permanent scarcity.
This also brings up a super cool opportunity to get in there and look for un-minted works that you might lose the chance to collect forever if you don’t move now. See this thread for ideas.
I would recommend you read more about it on their website but it’s infamously vague.
Artist to check out and collect: Adam Disbrow
We have been following this guy’s art for a little while, and I wanted to highlight him here for any NFT collectors who haven’t seen his work. What I particularly love about him is that he’s a talented American Expressionist painter first and an NFT artist on top of that. If you head over to the About section on his website, you can read more about his journey.
If you take a look at AD_AD’s art, it’s easy to see why he’s seen so much success in the NFT space — he’s a hell of a painter. This to me is one of the simplest refutations of the “it’s just jpegs!” NFT argument. In a world where you can own both the physical and the digital copy of a piece of art, why wouldn’t you? Particularly when you have savvy artists that figure out ways to bundle them or relate them easily for their collectors.
“Heart You” did some wild code breaking cryptography thing with prize money
And honestly between you and me and Heart You and Pete Sampras I don’t understand it too well. But, it boils down to the fact that NFT artist Heart You released a collection of pieces called Codebreakers. Hidden within them was a coded title of Heart You’s favorite book, and if you could solve it, you won 2,222 tezos. Which, as of writing, is worth about $7,800. Free money!
This is the kind of work that makes NFTs so utterly fascinating for me. The community of collectors is engaged and challenged — not only by the visuals of the art itself, but intellectually by the artist themselves. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in the physical world (haven’t you seen National Treasure?), but it shows how rich the space can be.
I highly recommend clicking through those links above and checking out their twitter and collection on objkt.com.
Coachin’ and Connectin’
Our company, Outli3rs, is kicking off some one-on-one coaching and collecting opportunities. For negotiable fees (dude, we aren’t expensive), we’ll get on the zoom with you and talk through your collecting strategy, look at some pieces together, and if the mood strikes you, we’ll add some pieces to your collection. This is a great opportunity for new collectors to get your feet wet in a low stress way. Just fill out the form on the website or hit us with a DM on the tweeter.
