This week in NFT land we saw Ross Ulbricht sell his NFT collection for $6.27 million, Ubisoft anger its gamers, Jimmy Wales anger Wikipedians, and Quentin Tarantino anger Miramax.
Ross Ulbricht NFT Auction Won by FreeRossDAO
The NFT auction for Ross Ulbricht’s artworks fetched over $6 million at auction, with the winners being FreeRossDAO, the group set up purely to win the collection. The DAO raised over $11 million and won the auction easily, with most of the proceeds going to the campaign to free Ross.
WE DID IT. Over 1,320 people raised over 2,800 ETH in a week (over $12m at todays price) to win the auction for Ross’s NFT (sold at 1446 ETH – about half of our treasury). Crypto is amazing.
Here’s what happens now 👇👇👇
— FreeRossDAO (@FreeRossDAO) December 9, 2021
When Making a Mint Doesn’t Make You a Mint
Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea this week revealed that only 1 in 4 NFTs purchased during minting lead to a profit, exploding the myth that NFTs are a route to an easy fortune. However, this was compared with 65% of NFTs traded in the secondary markets providing their owners with a profit, so there is some solace after all.
Ubisoft Quartz Not Exactly a Gem
Ubisoft’s announcement of its new NFT platform Ubisoft Quartz has gone down so badly that the company has removed the announcement video from some regional YouTube channels. Ubisoft announced the tie in with Tezos on Tuesday, but gamers accused Ubisoft of squeezing every last cent out of the Ghost Recon franchise rather than creating something new and improving existing games and plagued the videos with tens of thousands of dislikes.
Gone are the days when a buzzword was all you needed to get by.
Jimmy Wales to Auction the “Birth of Wikipedia” as an NFT
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is to sell what he says is the first-ever Wikipedia edit as an NFT. According to Christie’s, which is hosting the auction, the buyer will win a “digital sculpture comprised of ‘Hello, World’ wiki database files, perl cgi-script, digital rendering, url to live website” hosted at editthisnft.com, with a separate auction for the physical Strawberry iMac that Wales used at the time of Wikipedia’s launch.
Some Wikipedians aren’t happy, questioning the merits of the enterprise, but if it stops Wikipedia begging for money every few months then it can only be a good thing.
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) December 3, 2021
Shots Fired Between Quentin Tarantino and Miramax
Quentin Tarantino has called Miramax’s efforts to stop him auctioning off unproduced bits of the script for Pulp Fiction as NFTs as “offensively meritless” in his attempt to get the suit thrown out. Tarantino says he owns the rights to the script and is planning to auction them off as NFTs, but Miramax has said that in fact it owns anything and everything to do with Pulp Fiction and has sued the director to prevent him going ahead with it and, basically, getting there before them.
