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This week we look at Chromie Squiggles: The first release on the generative art platform Art Blocks.
Table of Contents
Chromie Squiggles by Snowfro
Available now on OpenSea
About the creator
Erick (also known as Snowfro) is an artist from Houston who works with various physical and digital media, including LED art, digital art, 3-D blocks, and ceramic tile.
Most importantly, Erick is the founder of Art Blocks, the world’s first platform dedicated to decentralized generative art.
Art Blocks is a generative art platform that allows collectors to mint tokens without actually knowing what they will get until it’s minted. The artist writes a code that is plugged into the platform, which generates different combinations of the variables at random.
Snowfro came up with the idea for Art Blocks when he was scooping up CryptoPunks in 2017. He felt it was unfair that he got to claim & hoard zombies. He sold 20+ zombies over the next few years in order to fund the development of Art Blocks.
About the marketplace
Art Blocks is a storefront for genuinely programmable and on-demand generative artwork that is stored directly on the Ethereum blockchain.
Each piece is randomly generated by an algorithm defined by the artist, there are endless possibilities to what your unique generation could look like.
Art Blocks is split into two sub-marketplaces: Curated and Uncurated.
Art Blocks Curated is the most strictly curated offering in the Art Blocks product suite. Submissions are made by individual artists or collaborations and approved by the curation board before they go live. These highly innovative releases by renowned artists reflect astounding beauty and innovation both artistically and technically.
To date, there have been 13 curated projects and six uncurated projects released on the platform.
About the drop
This isn’t a drop, as the Squiggles were released back in March. But it’s an interesting opportunity.
Chromie Squiggle is Snowfro’s only project his Art Blocks platform. They are the largest project currently on the platform by far.
Simple and easily identifiable, each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform. Erick considers each squiggle his personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer.
Snowfro said he loved how the squiggles could capture multiple cycles of a spectrum or a very limited segment of the spectrum. The shape of the squiggle itself was created to provide enough randomness so that all mints are unique.
There have been 9,166 squiggles minted out of 10,000 max, but public minting of the Chromie Squiggle is permanently paused. The remaining mints will likely be dropped at some point in the future.
Squiggles are now reserved for manual distribution to collectors and community members. The only way to buy them is via OpenSea.
Sales and price history
- The most expensive Chromie Squiggle is Chromie Squiggle #2227, which last sold for 10.5 ETH ($26,058.06)
- Squiggles currently available on OpenSea have little price history. Those that do are showing modest appreciation over the past few weeks.
- Over the past week, the average price paid via the Art Blocks platform is .34 ETH ($858)
Volume
With 353 sales totaling $316,487 of transaction volume, Art Blocks are currently ranked #7 in NFT art sales over the past week.
Artist community
Art Blocks
Snowfro
- Twitter: 12.8k
Verdict
3/5
In general, machine-generated art is unlikely to retain value as well as human-generated art. Although it can be extremely cool, it’s not as tough to create, not as valuable (in our opinion) and depending on the strength of the algorithm, can come off as a bit lazy.
Chromie Squiggles are indeed unique, randomly generated squiggles of color. But they are randomly generated squiggles from the founder of a rapidly growing NFT artwork marketplace, which significantly increases the value.
The squiggles are still relatively inexpensive (depending on your definition) and potentially undervalued. Despite the recent NFT market crash, they have a good chance of price appreciation given this is Snowfro’s first drop on his unique new generative marketplace.
