- Erick Calderon, CEO at Art Blocks, says the company’s squiggle NFTs have sold out.
- Last week, Art Blocks’ NFTs generated around $80 million in sales.
- “Now every time we release something it feels like this drop because it just sells out instantly,” Erick said.
Erick Calderon, CEO at Art Blocks, says the company’s squiggle NFTs have sold out at lightning fast speed. He says as soon as they release something, it gets hoovered up.
Art Blocks is a generative art platform, meaning that each token is randomly generated by a previously defined algorithm. In other terms, collectors who use this platform have no idea what kind of squiggle they will get since the algorithm mints new, unique, and distinct tokens each time.
The operators of Art Blocks, a squiggle-rich NFT platform, are shocked by the rate at which artworks are being snapped up. “We just can’t keep art live on the platform,” says Erick Calderon, CEO of Art Blocks.
“Now every time we release something it feels like this drop because it just sells out instantly,” he says. “That’s not the goal. It’s a little crazy.”
Art Blocks, which is known for its colorful “squiggles,” offers users an element of mystery.
Buyers can select an artistic style and pay up, then wait with bated breath as an algorithm creates their randomly generated piece of art. The artwork can also be bought and sold via secondary marketplaces like Rarible and OpenSea, which has recently passed $1 billion in monthly volume for the first time.
Art Blocks has witnessed a surge in summer sales amid a broader resurgence in the most pixelated and perhaps most hyped corner of the crypto market.
NFTs Are Heating Up
After a period of market quietness, the hype around NFTs is now sparkling again. In the last couple of weeks, the market for NFTs has been recording new milestones, one after another.
CEO of the largest NFT marketplace OpenSea, Devin Finzer, revealed earlier this month that his platform processed around $95 million in transactions in just two days. In comparison, the platform processed just over $20 million for the entirety of 2020.
During the recent NFT frenzy, CryptoPunks generated over $207 million in sales in one week, becoming the most popular form of NFT. Axie Infinity has also garnered huge revenue, raking in $127 million in sales in the last week of July alone.
In addition, in this past week, more than $220 million worth of NFTS was traded in over 55,000 deals. Art Blocks’ NFTs have been the most popular, generating around $80 million in sales. Penguins and apes NFTs are also among the most popular forms of non-fungible tokens.
Apes NFTs, which come in the form of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), have processed over $30 million in sales. More interestingly, Etherrocks, an NFT project that sells rocks in the form of NFTs, has been charging customers hundreds of thousands of dollars for each piece.
EtherRock 87 purchased for Ξ187 Ether
($611,170.23)9 mins ago (Aug-22-2021 06:39:03 AM +UTC)
Txn: https://t.co/0bICy16wX1#EtherRock #EtherRocks pic.twitter.com/muW95pOfz5
— EtherRock Price (@etherrockprice) August 22, 2021
Cryptopunks, which were the most popular form of NFT in late July, garnered just over $28 million this past week, becoming the third most popular NFT project in the last week. Other projects like Meebits, Veefriends, Deafbeef, and Cyberkongz are also recording more sales, with Meebits recently garnering $2.4 million in sales across 203 deals.
