The Collection and the Buying Process

Hello, fellow collectors. We are thrilled, honoured and humbled to have you here. We have put a lot of heart, passion and hard work into what you are seeing here and on the website — it is a great pleasure to have people learn about it.

Having said that, let’s get to it.

The Collection

The Original Block Collection consists of 8893 NTFs, each representing a particular block number on the Ethereum blockchain. We chose that number to honor the transaction count in Ethereum’s block 0. Those NFTs represent and are inspired by 1000 block numbers, carefully handpicked from our entire block history, from block 0 to this moment.

Upon collection, those 1000 numbers were handed over to our collaborating artists who deployed a number of creative techniques, including some unbelievable creative coding skills, to turn them into works of arts. As a result, our pieces celebrate one thousand particular events that happened on the blockchain — things like genesis blocks of projects, huge on-chain transfers, round block numbers and many others.

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:

This is a 4/11 piece, inspired by the birth of MoneyToken (ITM) that happened on block number 5841681. There are 11 pieces like that out there, each with a different index number. You get the idea.

Moving up the rarity ladder, you will find pieces that are increasingly rarer and rarer, until you come all the way to the top and see our crown jewels, things like — lifting the curtain a little bit — the birth of Binance, or all the heroes of the DeFi age.

A sneak peak at one of the unique ones — 1inch:

And at the very top you will obviously find no other than the king himself — Block 0, the Birth of Ether. This is our rarest piece, it exists only in one copy, 1/1, and is possibly valued accordingly once revealed.

Globally, this is our Rarity distribution:

The Buying Process

Now, how to get your hands on those. For the time being, the only way is to participate in the Original Block Collection Sale on our website right over at http://bai.art.

Two important things to notice about the Sale. First, it works on a curve. We are fairly certain this comes as a pretty standard model these days. The curve is hardcoded in the smart contract and is, as most things within the Institute, based on a number of blocks.

The levels, the start and the finish of the Sale are as follows:

The other important thing to notice about the Sale is the fact that we chose a blind buying process. That means that when you purchase a piece through the website, you do not know what piece you are getting. You are getting “a piece” and you are mathematically and cryptographically sure you will get a piece of our Collection — but you, among all other collectors, will only find out the particulars of your piece(s) upon the Full Collection Premiere. We believe it to be the industry standard for all the right reasons.

And so, after you purchase your piece(s) and head over to the My Collection section of the website, this is what you will see:

Those will then be revealed on block 12091 in the Full Collection Premiere, upon which our complete sold body of work will be distributed among the collectors, a few very lucky of whom will end up with our rarest pieces and one extremely lucky owner will find themselves to be in possession of The Birth of Ether.

We employed a number or algorithms and other techniques to make sure the entire process is fair, safe and truly random. We cannot wait for the Premiere ourselves.

After the Collection Premiere, all unsold pieces will be automatically included in the Institute’s Legacy Collection.

That’s all for now.

Thank you for reading, watching and, in general, being here.