Why I bought 500 NFTs in less than 24 hours
If anyone accused me of being an eth maxi, I would probably agree. I‘ve never bought any $SOL or $ADA, I believe high gas fees are bullish rather than bearish for the ecosystem, and one of my worst NFT experiences was when I couldn’t move my Damien Hirst from Palm to Ethereum for six weeks because the bridge didn’t support hardware wallets yet. I like my NFTs to be on Ethereum, it feels like the real deal, the high end of the market. This is also why I prefer to build on Ethereum.
That said, I do love wasting time getting lost in all the random and weird art you can find on Hic Et Nunc. I don’t know if Tezos will stand the test of time, and I don’t know why its market places all seem to struggle to load assets in a reasonable time. But the quirkiness of it all almost feels like a feature more than a bug, a vital part of the experience, never knowing what’s behind the next corner.
It also feels liberating to be able to buy digital artworks for a few dollars each, without having to worry about gas fees. You automatically shift from an investment mindset to just buying what you like. No matter how much we like to tell ourselves that we’re all in it for the art, spending your money on art that is virtually free does have quite a different feel to it.
And it’s the best feeling ever. If you don’t mind spending a bit of your time looking around, you can easily pick up a dozen amazing artworks on Tezos for less than what you would pay in gas fees for a single NFT transaction on Ethereum. At those prices, don’t even bother about DYOR, just go with your gut feeling, buy what you think is cool, learn to trust your own taste, discover new artists. Maybe you even help someone sell their very first piece of art ever, and they might live in a country where those few dollars actually do make a difference.
One thing you’ll notice on HEN is that artists use editions more freely. With large volumes of art selling at very low prices (and gas fees being negligible), price discovery tends to be much more dynamic. A typical artist on HEN might have a 1,000 edition listed at 0.1 tez, a 100/100 edition for 1 tez each, a few 10/10s for 10–20 tez and 1/1s ranging from 50 to 500 tez.
When I first bought art on Tezos, I mainly looked for cheap 1/1s, but you risk missing out on more established artists by doing that. While Tezos has its own celebrated super stars (John Karel being the most notable example), artists like Pop Wonder and Killer Acid will also occasionally drop work on Tezos (even XCOPY is on there), giving you the opportunity to buy their work at a heavy discount if you happen to be paying attention. This is why I always try to keep a bit of Tezos in reserve (at least in theory — in practice, I find it impossible to stay crypto-liquid because I inevitably spend it all on NFTs).
This week HEN reached the milestone of 500k total minted assets, and artists started a trend of making celebratory drops and sharing them on Twitter under the hashtag #hen500k. By Friday evening, I was seeing more and more of these pop up in my feed, most of them editions of 500 for 0.5 tez each, often with an expressed intent to burn all unsold editions after 50 hours.
Maybe I was just feeling bored due to the recent lull in the NFT market, but I started thinking that it might be cool to collect one piece from all these different celebratory drops, say up to 500 pieces at 0.5 tez each, which would set me back about 0.33 eth in total. It would be a snapshot in time of a vibrant community, a relatively small bet on both the Tezos ecosystem and the artists involved.
If Tezos keeps growing over the next few years, a collection like this might have some historic significance and value at some point. And even if just one of these 500 artists happens to make a big break, I might easily win back my investment some day. Keep in mind that most of these drops won’t sell out at all, so if the artists burn the remaining supply after a few days, you might end up with an edition of 5 rather than 500. But really, this was mostly about the art anyway (no, really!).
So I decided to go for it. I moved some Tezos to a separate wallet, bought the hen500k.tez name, linked the name and my Twitter profile to the wallet, and started searching for tweets tagged with #hen500k(*). I had somewhat underestimated the amount of work it would take, but in the end I did manage to collect over 500 pieces in under 24 hours (and even payed a visit to NFT.LDN in between).
At this rate, I couldn’t really afford to do any kind of curation, because I didn’t even know upfront if I would be able to find enough different drops meeting the constraints. It also felt like I was up against a deadline, because some of the drops had already started burning their remaining supply before I even got started.
What surprised me the most was how great most of the art really was. If you look closely, you might be able to spot maybe a handful of pieces that feel a bit lower effort, where an artist might have tried to seize the moment to make a quick buck (but then again, who am I to say what is art and what isn’t). But the vast majority of the collection feels more like the artists were dropping their very best work to present themselves to a broader audience while celebrating this milestone.
The other thing that surprised me was the overwhelming response from the community. You don’t really expect anything at all when you buy an NFT for $3 (or even 30 cents), so having all these artists reach out on Twitter to personally thank me felt very humbling to be honest. Overall it was a fun experience, and a reminder that art is everywhere and transcends all boundaries, both off-chain and on-chain. You can browse my hen500k collection here.
(*) Edit: apparently the pro-move would have been to use a tool like NFTBiker to filter artworks by tag and then buy them in batch. That might have saved me a lot of time but I also would have missed out on most of the interactions with artists on Twitter that way.
If you read all this way, I want to send you a heartfelt thank you, and I would love to connect with you on Twitter!
