In Breif:
- TIMEPieces of TIME magazine becomes the first NFT collection by a media organisation.
- The collection comprises of 4,676 tokens.
- All NFTs were sold in under a minute.
- Gas fees raised to 9,000 gwei due to rapid transaction.
TIME Magazine announced a new collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) on 23rd September 2021, featuring more than 40 artists’ original works, promising “unlimited access” to its website until 2023. The collection, “TIMEPieces”, consists of 4,676 tokens attached to digital artworks, each priced at.1 ETH (about $310).
The collection of 4,676 NFTs sold out in just a minute. However, the sale jammed the Ethereum network, causing fees to rise. buyers spent nearly four times as much on transaction fees as they did on NFTs. The gas price goes up to 9,000 gwei for a quick transaction.
There were around 700 NFT holders when the minting was completed. Ten of TIME’s NFTs cost $70,000 to one address. The launch strategy was direct. The NFTs would go on sale at a specific time, and interested purchasers would book it quickly.
It was a blind drop with each buyer receiving random TIMEPiece from the collection. The revelation of NFTs was after selling off all of the pieces. To find out what they possess, users will have to utilise the “refresh metadata” option on the digital marketplace OpenSea.
The benefits associated with purchasers of TIMEPieces as part of the Build A Better Future drop will expire on 1st December 2022.
Why Did Gas Fees Rise?
Many folks knew the mainnet deploy in advance and were able to plan ahead to bot their transactions. Finding the contract was easy for them as the contract was verified. There were no limits to mint NFTs per wallet.
The bots took advantage by charging unreasonable prices for assets on the secondary market. They increased their “priority fee” offering to incentivize the miners to proceed with their transactions. People who can afford to pay those high fees can easily cut the line. The 100 addresses with the most NFTs now own around 24% of the total supply.
Grossman said that high fees and inequitable distribution of NFTs were “not ideal.” “I think we learned a lot about gas in general,” he further added. “There are things that you can’t control for in the gas space,” he added.
“We’re going to make sure that the next time that we do this, everything that we have seen that went wrong or that didn’t go as we planned, is fixed,” he said.
Despite the chaos, Grossman insisted that he was proud of today’s launch. Grossman is increasingly adopting crypto over the past year. Time began accepting crypto payments for its digital description in June. It also collaborated with The Cool Cats NFT project in August.
