The Chevy NFT is a custom rendering of the Z06 Corvette in collaboration with artist xsullo.
The content of the Chevy NFT is a cyberpunk-themed digital drawing of a green Corvette Z06 by artist Nick Sullo (aka xsullo). As an added bonus, the winning bidder would receive an exclusive «Mint Green» Corvette Z06, as it is the only car painted in this color.
You would also get an RFN code to «forever bind» the car to the NFT auction. Despite the joint competitions for the drawing and the exclusive royal car, there was no winner.
While it may seem like Chevrolet is the loser on this show, the real loser is DonorsChoose. This is an educational charity chosen by Chevrolet as auctioneer.
Chevy NFT Auction Details
The Chevy NFT auction had a total of 206 ethers with an average value of $250,000, but there were no potential buyers in the six-day auction. The Chevy NFT failed to sell.
Interestingly, there were two bids, but well below the lowest bid. The first is from a user with the nickname @belgianpov for $860. The other offered 4 ETH at $5,000.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are losing popularity and their prices are falling, with sales falling by as much as 67%. According to Nansen’s report, NFT sales on OpenSea, the largest market for this type of «digital art», have fallen by two-thirds.
Nobody wanted the first Chevy NFT, not even with a Corvette Z06 as a gift.
With the cryptocurrency market in free fall, Chevy NFT is of no interest to anyone. The auction in question lasted 4 days, from June 20 to 24; on the last day SuperRare reopened the auction for 24 hours. This was reported on Twitter, with reports that some users may have missed the auction and had another chance to bid.
All of that ended up being zero bids from interested parties, no bids registered. Faced with this situation, the representative of Chevrolet, Trevor Tompkins, had to accept the situation and issued a statement.
In it, they state that their first steps into the NFT and Web3 markets have provided them with opportunities to learn and gain experience. However, they have not given up looking for new alternatives in this volatile market without specifying whether they will try again in this area or another.
«Our first steps into Web3 are educational, and we will continue to explore ways to use the technology to benefit our customers,» Tompkins said.
What Happened to The Chevy NFT? What About NFTs?
The popularity of NFTs has reached alarming heights in the last year. A frenzy fueled by a growing interest in the worlds of art, sports, and media. But beyond the millions of sales of these digital works of art, cryptocurrency scams exist to take financial advantage of this new technology.
In theory, blockchain technology should facilitate the sale of digital artist tokens by providing buyers with a permanent record of ownership over the asset. But whatever the point of view is or was, the current ecology of NFTs is a mess.
To illustrate what we’re talking about, just look at the latest move by OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace. Last week, it suddenly limited the number of free NFTs users could generate on its platform because more than 80% of the NFTs generated through the tool «were plagiarism, fake collections, and spam.»
NFT scams are big business. These include everything from impersonating artists and making fake offers on OpenSea, to typos and insider trading. Even Nate Chastain, product manager at OpenSea, was found guilty of insider trading in NFT trading.
Phishing scams are also on the rise, with major digital artists sounding the alarm about how easy it is to spot fakes. Following protests from developers of the NFT project, this same group, which a few days ago was 80%, raised this limit.
OpenSea tried to downplay the scale of the problem, in a recent Guardian article that looked at the platform’s links to fraud; the company noted that it handles 3,500 NFT collections a week. So when almost all of the free craft NFT collectibles on the platform are either spammed or hacked, one can’t help but wonder if OpenSea is now in a quagmire.
Fraud Alert
For artists on DeviantArt, home to more than 500 million pieces of digital art, the problem has become so serious that the platform has implemented a fraud alert system that scans the Ethereum blockchain for NFT copies of works of art. Since August, the platform has sent out 80,000 alerts.
OpenSea’s competitor, LooksRare, has been plagued by another serious problem: money laundering, an illegal form of market manipulation in which volume and value are inflated by buying and selling assets for themselves or for organized groups.
The bubble of enthusiasm combined with a weak market infrastructure (most projects are run through the video game chat platform Discord) has also led to a large number of scams and attacks against investors.
NFTs are used to raise money for dubious projects that end in dismal failures where the anonymous founders take all the money.
The Evolved Apes NFT project raises millions to help develop and monetize fighting games. Besides, the developer «Bad Ape» disappeared with 2.5 million euros.
The creator of Big Daddy Ape Club has stolen 1.2 million tokens on Solana.
Blockverse, an unofficial Minecraft NFT project, sold 10,000 NFTs shortly before its creator disappeared with over $1 million.
Is This Market For Only A Few To Make Money?
Only a few people can make gold. These are not isolated cases. Take for example Vignesh Sundaresan, the collector known as «MetaKovan», who bought a Beeple NFT for over $60 million, starting one of the first cycles of hype around the digital asset.
MetaKovan is actually an investor in Metapurse, a Singaporean company that earlier this year listed its mission as «democratizing access to and ownership of art.»
Metapurse bought 20 Beeple NFTs, four virtual museums, a soundtrack, and combined them all into one «NFT Package» offering shared ownership using 10 million B20 tokens. As it turns out, Beeple is a trading partner of MetaKovan and owns 2% of all B20 tokens, while MetaKovan owns the other 59%. Something doesn’t smell right. Even more so when 10% of merchants account for almost 90% of all transactions.
But the field keeps expanding at a dizzying rate. The main problem is not the amount of theft or fraud, although they are worrisome, because they currently do not pose a risk to anyone outside of the crypto community. But no scandal, hack, theft, or fraud has been big enough to weaken the insistence that NFTs are the future of digital assets and their ownership.
Could It Be That They Have Gone Out of Style?
The NFT boom is fading. Or rather, the bubbles created around it. Analysis firm Nansen claims that a third of the NFTs analyzed have very little or no trading volume. That is to say: a third of NFTs, unless they suddenly become popular, are dead because no one, or very few people, trades them. This does not necessarily mean that such NFTs are worthless. A painting, even if it is rarely sold and kept in the same hands for many years, retains its value. The same logic can be applied to many NFTs.
Nansen’s data also revealed another strange reality. Another third of the NFTs analyzed were trading below their exchange price. That is to say: the people who bought it when it was released would lose money if they decided to sell it today.
The dataset analyzed by Nansen consists of 8,400 collections on the Ethereum blockchain with 19.3 million NFTs. A sufficiently large sample that allows investors to draw general conclusions about current market dynamics.
Are NFTs Doomed? Is The Chevy NFT an Example?
This does not mean that all NFTs are useless, or that the technology behind them does not have potential now or in the future. But it seems to reflect what many experts have been pointing out for months: that a significant part of the market is made up of useless projects.
«Money moves so fast and it’s so ignorant,» WhaleShark, one of the world’s biggest collectors, told Bloomberg. The sentiment is reminiscent of the ICO experience in 2018, when thousands of projects raised a decent amount of money, only to fail soon after.
Furthermore, the trading volume of NFTs has decreased significantly in the last 30 days. Specifically, a 40% drop compared to the previous month, which was also noted by Nansen. OpenSea, the largest platform for buying and selling NFTs, saw an even steeper drop in volume – 67%, according to DappRadar, data compiled by Bloomberg.
Many have described this dynamic as a cooling off or correction move after a few months where the NFT market has gone absolutely crazy in terms of data relevance and funding volume. However, the industry seems to be experiencing a turning point.
To learn more about the volatile NFT market, or get access to many other related articles, visit our site Para Hombre.
The Path to The Perfect Connection
