Investors in NFT have been caught off guard, but the project’s hand-signed documents from Ethereum’s creator have drawn a steady stream of new investors.
The announcement today of an NFT collection bearing what appears to be the stamp of approval from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has set Crypto Twitter ablaze and resulted in a surge of sales of the NFTs to the extent of several million dollars.
Metalabel and Web3 funding platform Gitcoin worked together to make the NFT collection, which honors Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, for his work on a popular Web3 funding model. The open edition mint came out on March 1, but NFT traders may not have heard about it until today, when secondary sales suddenly exploded after the first sale period ended.
As of this writing, 4,692 ETH ($7.3 million) worth of trades have been made on The Quadratic Funding Collection in the last 24 hours, and the floor price has risen to $905 ($0.58 ETH).
Each NFT in the collection, which is called a “record” in Metalabel parlance, looks like an album cover and comes with a digital version of the 2018 whitepaper “Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design for Philanthropic Matching Funds” signed by Buterin, economists Glen Weyl and Zo Hitzig, and Buterin. It’s Metalabel’s first “Quality Drop” project.
The NFT project is a way to remember how the idea of quadratic funding came to be. Quadratic funding is a way to get more money for projects by matching individual donations. RadicalxChange, which Weyl started to promote decentralization and diversity in government and governance, says that the math formula “prioritizes projects based on the number of people who contributed.”
That means a few whales can’t decide how matching funds are allocated based on their donation alone—project support is also a factor.
Gitcoin, a quadratic-funding platform for open-source Web3 tools and projects, has awarded $70 million across the Ethereum ecosystem.
Each NFT also includes two essays by Gitcoin co-founders Kevin Owocki and Scott Moore on quadratic funding. The standard NFT was issued last week in an open-edition mint that concluded today at a cost of just 0.05 ETH ($78 as of today). In the end, 9,209 standard NFTs were minted.
Twelve additional limited-edition “signature” editions of the NFT were sold via Dutch auction with signed physical copies of the whitepaper.
In the end, according to Metalabel, the overall drop raised over $781,000 for public good initiatives. The drop and secondary royalties will fund Gitcoin’s matching pool and Weyl’s Plurality Institute, a research organization.