April 20: The Meta Burn Update
Hey Everyone,
So, it’s done. We’ve done the deed, burned some things and are now ready to talk about it.
Quickly looking at a bigger picture, we did the promised metadata push last week and right now we’ve just completed the burn and now we want to take a second to talk about it in greater detail — before we move on to the next elements of our plan.
The Meta Burn — and the Plot Twist
Originally, the plan for the burn was to destroy all artwork with rarity indexes of 11, 10 and 9, that is Commons and Rares. That would amount to 3693 burned tokens. We had come up with a funny little game for the Super Rares, so we wanted to spare them to play with them later. However, upon closer investigation it became clear that — due to the transferring costs — the mechanics of the game didn’t make much sense, so we decided to go ahead and burn all of our Super Rares, too.
In the end, that gave us exactly 4729 tokens that are no longer with us. Those are the burned pieces split into different categories:
This past week, we played with different options of destroying the pieces we wanted gone. Originally we looked at the usual option, the good old send to 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dead but, with over 4,700 tokens that we just said our final goodbyes to, the cost would have been anywhere between $200,000 on a cheap gas day to well over $400,000 on an expensive one. Dumb. It’s better to have money to play with for other things, spend it on the buybacks and the work on future collections, all benefitting our holders. That’s why, after much deliberation, we decided to do it via a metadata update, permanently delete the metadata for the tokens we wanted to burn, thus deleting their attributes, links to the original artwork and all other identifiable properties.
This will be the last metadata update ever pushed from our admin address — 0x03180053dd710798041dB050f747F852E22860FA.
All you’ll ever see there is lots and lots and lots of this:
Legacy Collection and Buyback
As previously communicated, with the burn out of the way, we can now focus on our Legacy Collection. A quick reminder of what the Legacy Collection is to us: “for its Legacy Collection, the Institute will seek to have one of each of the original Unique pieces of the Original Block Collection”. So whichever original /2 /3 pieces we don’t have, we will bid on it to get it on the market.
As the math would dictate, we were pretty fortunate in the reveal, collecting over half of all the Unique pieces, but we are still missing some pieces and we’d like to get our hands on them, so whoever’s lucky enough to have them, expect bids coming your way.
As part of our housekeeping efforts, we have split our art into three addresses:
- Our existing Legacy Collection has been moved to a new home here: https://opensea.io/accounts/BAI_Legacy_Collection This address will be doing the market buyback of whatever pieces we are still lacking for the complete Legacy Collection. Plus maybe other things — keep an eye on it.
- Our Power Auction pieces will be stored here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x0Bd222a26804c0Bb4eE10f8E95A371BbF1b42f31 — those are the additional original Unique pieces that we have on top of the ones needed for the Legacy Collection. So all /2s and /3s that we have more than one of. In the spirit of benefiting the community, as previously communicated, we will be selling them on 10 minute power auctions with a starting price of 0.01ETH. This will be communicated in advance, so everybody can have a chance to scoop them up cheap. (Note: the art is still on its way there. It’s a crazy gas day today with $100+ transfer cost per single NFT — we will wait for it to come down a bit).
- And finally our original address — https://etherscan.io/address/0x03180053dd710798041db050f747f852e22860fa — this is the smart contract owner, all art there is burned forever.
New Rarity and the Plot Twist
Ok, so on to the fun stuff.
Here’s the thing — the burn process was driven by a very simple logic: burn all pieces with rarity index of >7 in possession of the Institute. However, the results of this process are absolutely random, as we did not have the knowledge which pieces would belong to us in the reveal event. And so, when the burning ended, the smoke cleared and we were able to look at the ashes, we saw something quite marvellous.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the new Rarity Index:
So a couple of things here. First of all, there are now 33 artworks that exist only in 1 piece. They make up a total of 0.37% of the entire Collection. To give you an idea of how much randomness was involved in this process — this is how the 33 pieces split into previous rarity indexes:
There are now 12 pieces that used to be a /7, but are now a /1.
There are now 8 pieces that used to be a /8, but are now a /1.
There are now 8 pieces that used to be a /9, but are now a /1.
And, watch out, there are now 4 pieces that used to be a freaking /11, but are now a /1!
Nobody saw that coming, right? Congratulations to whoever’s holding those pieces, because one thing’s for sure — it’s not us.
Although not in our original buyback plans, we will seek to buy all 33 of those off the market — watch our for bids coming your way.
But that’s not all the fun. If you look on the other end of the new Rarity Table, you see something equally random and awesome:
So there are only three tokens left after the burn that exist in a set of 9 pieces — those are XVIV, Axion and Bitcoin Pro — and, out of those three, only Axion was originally a /9! That means it’s the only remaining set of 9 in the entire Collection. And there are plenty of more surprises if you look at the table closely.
What’s awesome is that the art itself hasn’t changed, so, while the rarity numbers in the bottom right are no longer valid, they still exist on our pieces, thus giving us a rarity index matrix.
A piece can have rarity index of 7 printed on the art, but it also exists as a two now due to the burn — and so on. We believe this will create unexpected market dynamics — and we are looking forward to seeing them play out.
The plan for now is to let the dust settle, take a good look around then and go shopping — this is our main focus for this week.
See you on Telegram and in the comments and, as usual, thank you for being on this journey with us.
Thank you,
Your friends at Blockchain Art Institute
