Full Collection Premiere: What Happens Today
Hey everyone,
So. Today is the day we have all been waiting for. A journey of over a hundred thousand blocks ends today, on block 12147200. A mere couple of hours from now, the entire Original Block Collection will be shown to the world for the first time and those of you with BAI tokens will finally be able to see what pieces of art their placeholder tokens turn into.
Speaking of art — we have already uploaded our complete body of work and updated the provenance section on the website accordingly. All there to see for the curious.
As previously communicated, we put 50 BAI Fair Bundles with 20 BAI for 4 ETH each on opensea to distribute the token more widely prior to the Premiere. As of right now, they have all been purchased, so an additional 1,000 BAI tokens has found its way to the community, the holders numbers are up and, as a result, more people will take part in today’s event. Good.
While a lot of people were super quick to buy additional BAI and increase their chance to have something fun happen to them today, some of you voiced their displeasure at this surprise, last-minute move. What we can say to you — and in the best possible faith: this is not the last surprise. We are not a project who purchased a ready-to-go marketing plan from an agency and is slowly just rolling the next point of our agenda out — we believe it has been demonstrated time and time again over our 10 days long journey; and it will, in all likelihood, be demonstrated again.
Our contract address currently still has 4,720 BAI in it and while we have some fun plans with tokens post-release, we’d still like for more people to get their hands on them, so we may or may not continue to put them on opensea at fair prices and try to gauge possible demand. If we do, however, this activity — and, in general, the team’s activity with Unrevealed Artworks, stops at around 11:30AM GMT, an hour before the Premiere.
And then the fun begins.
So to quickly recap where we are and what’s going to happen — technically, on block 12147200, our smart contract owner address (0x03180053dd710798041dB050f747F852E22860FA) will perform some <dev> magic </dev> and that tx will cause the complete body of work to be shuffled, reshuffled, indexed, reindexed and revealed. Look out for it.
(yes, nor very technical, we are aware — our dev will be in the chat if there are more technical questions about the procedure)
That is the same contract owner address that you all saw burn through some 120ETH last night to mint all but a couple of BAI, it’s also the same address that might be putting some Fair Bundles on opensea in the hours to come and that also will be betting (and we hope successfully) to buy back the pieces we’d like featured in our Legacy Collection after the reveal. There is currently a little over $325,000 in that wallet — let’s put it to good use.
Now, the Collection itself. It has been communicated again, but lots of stuff happened since, so a quick tour around the artwork, everyone — and what to look for when you see what’s yours.
The Original Block Collection is a set of unique visual experiences, created by both artists and AI, each representing and celebrating a particular block number on the Ethereum Blockchain. There were exactly 8893 transactions in the historic Block 0. To honor that, we created a collection of 8893 NFTs, celebrating 1000 carefully chosen blocks.
Among other features, our art comes with varying degrees of rarity. The most common type comes in 11 pieces per block number. Each block number with this rarity index exists in eleven different pieces, picturing the same art, but with a different index number. Just look at the bottom right on the piece below:
So, a 9. Not great, not terrible, the design’s still nice. This is statistically what is likely coming your way this afternoon.
But, in the spirit of hoping for the Block 0s of the world, let’s dive a bit deeper.
Our Rarity Distribution:
Most of us will probably get Common and Rare pieces, with rarity index of 11, 10 and 9. A couple of examples:
So what you upon the reveal is to simply look at the bottom right and see the rarity index to determine what you have received.
Now, there will then be Super Rares, /8s and /7s, and then the real fun begins as we get to the Unique ones.
Uniques with an index of 3 — a total of 93 pieces across the Collection — not only celebrate blocks that are particularly important, but also feature a different type of pattern design, a custom background and an all-around premium feel if they’re done by BAI — or something absolutely different when done by our Collaborating Artists. Just take a look at cDAI:
Or our dear Airswap:
Beautiful, right? We love them. So, 31 Originals out there, 3 pieces of each, a total of 91. Look out for those — we hope you get them all.
Next on come Uniques with rarity index of 2 — and those are almost all done by our collaborating Artists. You have seen some sneak peaks on twitter and, to keep the mystery alive, we will not tease this work further at this point. We are, however, in complete awe when we see what has been accomplished here — and we’re sure you will be, too.
And then, obviously, comes Block 0 — but that’s already been discussed.
So. This is it, Ladies and Gentlemen. We are now getting on with a bit of technical work left before the final Reveal. Good luck to everybody.
Thank you
Your friends at Blockchain Art Institute
PS
One more thing. Upon the Reveal, the Institute will refrain from any second market selling activity, regardless of what we get (barring Block 0 that is governed by a different set of rules, outlined in the article). The only activity you will see from us in the initial stages will be the buying. Thanks.
