Latest Art Blocks-Factory News

Art Blocks announced the launch of its own secondary marketplace to address security, authenticity, and royalties.

❗ Why It Matters

The new Art Blocks secondary marketplace is meaningful because it's safe, ensures the buyer is getting the original artwork, and protects the creator royalties that have been a bedrock of the web3 space (that is, until Blur and OpenSea both opted to make royalties optional above 0.5%).

The Deets

The Art Blocks secondary marketplace addresses three primary pain points:

• Security: The Art Blocks secondary marketplace is safe, "built on top of the battle-tested Seaport protocol for in-product listings while aggregating other marketplaces with Reservoir so that you know you’re getting the best price."
• Authenticity: All listings on the Art Blocks marketplace are from legitimate Art Blocks projects and artists.
• Royalties: The two largest secondary market platforms have both made royalties optional, so Art Blocks is making sure to honor them on its own marketplace. Art Blocks has consistently been committed to royalties and views the trend of declining royalties as harmful to digital artists’ ability to make a living.

🎬 Take Action

• See the new secondary marketplace in action with Art Blocks' latest Curated release, Cargo, here.
• Read Art Blocks Editorial: Our Secondary Market is Kind of a Big Deal

🎤 Community Quotes

🕳️ Go Deeper

• Trade Art Blocks, on Art Blocks (February 22, 2023)
• Don't Leave Art Blocks Again (January 27, 2023)

The Art Blocks secondary marketplace will boast lowest fees whilst fully honoring artist and creator royalties, says purplehat.eth.

❗ Why It Matters

Art Blocks has made it known that creator royalties will still be protected for purchases made on its own marketplace, amidst the backdrop of the ongoing feud between Blur and OpenSea that has targeted those very royalties.

This move comes less than a month after Art Blocks added support for secondary purchasing directly on its website, a move that was also designed to enforce royalties and support creators.

What It Means

• The secondary marketplace functionality has been expanded to include native listings/delistings, removing the need for another marketplace at all.
• Aggregated listings that don't include creator royalties will be royalty-normalized to properly include them.

🎤 Community Quotes

🧠 Learn More

• Don't Leave Art Blocks Again

Art Blocks has added support for secondary purchasing directly on the Art Blocks website, according to a developer announcement in the community Discord.

❗Why It Matters

Art Blocks adding secondary support for its NFTs ensures that the platform will no longer need to rely on any other secondary marketplace or third party for its sales. Additionally, all sales on the Art Blocks marketplace will automatically enforce royalty payments, supporting creators whilst removing any anxieties from purchasers about whether or not royalties are being supported. 

The Deets

All NFTs will be listed at the lowest price based on listings from the following NFT marketplaces: "OpenSea, LooksRare, X2Y2, Sansa, Zora, Foundation, CoinbaseNFT, Rarible, Sudoswap, and Reservoir." At this time, Blur is not supported but the team is hoping to add it soon. 

🧠 Learn More

• Art Blocks Announces Next Curated Project
• Art Blocks Partners With Bright Moments
• Art Blocks Shares Details About Open House

Art Blocks' new website is live, the team announced this afternoon. This is another step in the team's transition to Art Blocks v2.0, set to formally begin on November 1st.

The "revamped, beautiful online environment" includes the new logo, lovingly referred to as "lilsquig" and includes more content pages for the artists, the artwork, the Art Blocks company, and its team.

A new online journal called "Spectrum" will have its own landing page, where the team plans to feature interviews, educational content, news, and other audio and video content.

The navigation tabs on the site include:

• Featured - home for new and recent content,
• How It Works - basic background, artist landing pages, and FAQs
• About - information on the company, including the roadmap, team information, and Art Blocks Engine
• Journal - home for Spectrum (described above)
• Browse Art button, taking users to the classic inventory of projects

Early feedback from the community seems to be positive, though the site has been live for less than one hour. The Art Blocks team encouraged users with any feedback to bring it to their upcoming AMA on November 3rd.

Follow along with the action on the project page or check out the artwork's rarity at its artacle page.

Fontana is Latin for fountain, and thus is the theme of this generative project. From the project description, Fontana is "a playful attempt at abstractly capturing the flowing movement of a fountain using precisely drawn elements that evoke a static and considered rendering of a subject that is in constant flux."

The resulting outputs are still captures of a flowing fountain, an ambitious vision for Harvey.

He has used techniques in the algorithm to make the outputs appear old and discolored as if they each had "spent its life in the bottom of a mechanics drawer." Interestingly, the color expression of the set is fully generative and thus there are no set palettes or rarity, a mechanism that most artists do tend to employ.

Harvey has a history with Art Blocks, as he previously dropped a Factory project called "Photon's Dream" which minted out early this summer and became somewhat of a cult favorite in the Art Blocks community.

The project reached a floor near 0.2 ETH at its peak (currently 0.17 ETH) and has traded 34 ETH over its lifetime. 

Market Analysis and Prediction

Series 8 has not performed well on the secondary markets, and the primary market has been impacted as well. Early sets were minted in the high 1 ETH or 2+ ETH range, and that mint-out price has fallen below 1 ETH for most sets at this time. The most recent Curated drop, Act of Emotion, minted out just above 0.6 ETH and currently sits at 0.45 ETH floor with a supply of 400 NFTs.

The bull case for Fontana is that the artist is well-liked, the outputs are still (still performs better than animated almost always) and the outputs have some nice aesthetics with some very interesting emergent themes (spirals and bullseyes as the most common).

The bear case is that rarity will likely not be a factor in this set, meaning no rare lotto for primary buyers, which caps the upside. I expect the top outputs to go for 2-3 ETH on the mint day, considerably less than what rares have gone for in sets from earlier in the summer. The lack of palettes, while innovative, also prevents palette-based collecting and the creation of sets across projects. Lastly, the floor on Photon's Dream at just 0.17 ETH is not a great sign of strength headed into the mint.

The most likely scenario is mint action similar to the last Curated drop, minting out in the 0.5-0.7 ETH range. There are some tailwinds coming from the success of QQL, but it's not clear whether those will translate to Fontana. If this drops below 0.5 ETH, it becomes very attractive; above 1 ETH and it's much riskier from a trading perspective. The other factor to consider is who is minting - if it's mostly traders/flippers, expect 40-50 percent of the collection to be listed on secondary within an hour of the mint, sending the secondary price downward. If it feels like mostly collectors, the outcome should be better. But as always, if you love the art, mint away.

For those who want to learn more about the artist and/or the project, check out this interview with Jeff Davis the COO of Art Blocks.

This morning the Art Blocks team made a blockbuster announcement, sharing initial details for "the next version of Art Blocks," labeled Art Blocks 2.0.

For a quick overview, the changes will include:

• New designations for the product collections
• An updated, more efficient smart contract
• A newly rebranded website that will include more educational info and thought leadership

The primary area of focus in early discussions has been on product collection changes. The Playground and Factory sets will be sunsetted, replaced by "Art Blocks Presents," though the curation and application process will remain the same.

There will be two new collections, with the first called "Art Blocks Explorations," described as "a place for our wild ideas and commissioned experiments."

The other new collection is "Art Blocks Collaborations," which will be home to their market partnerships (i.e. projects like Petro National which was a collab with Pace).

The legacy Curated collection will remain unchanged, though the team does share that the requirements to pass the application process include projects that "push the boundaries of the medium."

Read more about the scope of changes in this blog post from the Art Blocks team.

What Does This Mean for the Art Blocks Market?

A few reactions to how this will impact the market and "too early" predictions:

The removal of the Factory and Playground labels will put an increased focus on the quality of the art.

Some of the best generative art on Art Blocks has absolutely come through the Factory set (i.e. Horo, Rapture, Lewitt Generators - the list goes on), yet it has historically carried a stigma as lower quality, along with lower floor price. This change of label may be the first step in removing that stigma and enabling a more pure valuation of the art on its merits (versus what collection it resides in). The new label "Art Blocks Presents" also makes the set sound like it is coming directly from the team, based on its naming convention - assuredly more attractive than "Factory."

There are now multiple new sets that can be made (and they will see a bump in value).

There is now a distinct start and end date for the Factory and Playground collections, ending in October 2022. These full collections have been mostly easier to collect than Curated from a price standpoint (putting Playground set "The Eternal Pump" aside), but collectors have backed off due to how difficult it felt to maintain over time.

Now that difficulty has been removed and the task is doable (still fairly pricey). There are currently 230 Factory projects, and with just four weeks left in October, the final tally will be somewhere around 240. There are 64 Playground projects, and that final tally will come in below 70.

With the rebrand to 2.0, there is also a new "Art Blocks v1.0" set that can be created. It consists of all of the Curated from series 1-8 along with Factory and Playground (in theory the v0 set is the day 1 set, Squiggles, Construction Token, and Genesis). Given that there are 66 Curated projects, the full Art Blocks v1.0 set would require 357 pieces at the time of writing. There are also now Curated v0 and Curated v1 sets which can be made - quite a variety of options for the dedicated collector.

From a market standpoint, do not expect a big bump in price in the near term - but over time, those sets which can create bottlenecks for each set (those with the lowest supply) could very well be the primary beneficiaries. Additionally, if Art Blocks stays relevant for 10-20+ years (which they are absolutely laying the foundation to do), all the sets in v1.0 are likely to see a bump due to historical significance over. The final mints for the v1.0 set, across Factory, Playground, and Curated all probably get a slight bump in value as well, so watch out for that in the final weeks of October.

Gas wars are going to get worse.

The new contract is said to reduce gas costs by 65 percent - great news! But the reality is, this means the botters and flippers are just going to ramp gas 65 percent higher (if not more) for the high-demand mints, knowing the fees won't be bad.

For the less experienced minter, this could very well make the minting process more difficult. To be clear, this is not a bad thing, it's quite good, but a change to be aware of and to act upon for those looking to stay competitive in minting new projects on the primary market (by adjusting gas settings ahead of mints).

Conclusion

This seems to be a very positive step forward for the Art Blocks team and good for the community. The community has responded in kind, with early feedback in the discord overwhelmingly positive. In fact, one of the most common remarks after the announcement was a desire for equity in Art Blocks as a company - with the common response being "buy squiggles." Squiggles have always been seen as the project most tied to Art Blocks and a bet on the company itself, and that narrative will only get stronger. Plus, they move.

Overall, the leadership team continues to evolve the brand and seek out innovation, cementing themselves in the very top tier of leadership in this young but growing NFT market. It will be fun to watch as this grand experiment continues to unfold before our eyes...

Lucky Trader's Tyler Warner shared his too early predictions about the Art Blocks announcement. 

Art Blocks Factory and Playground collections are coming to an end as the generative art platform focuses on a new collection: Art Blocks Presents, according to an announcement Tuesday.

Projects which pass through the platform’s current application review process will be released as Art Blocks Presents and the ones that “push the boundaries” will be chosen as Art Blocks Curated, the Medium article said. Current Factory and Playground collections that are set to be released will receive a “special Heritage designation," but the collections will no longer see additional projects.

Art Blocks also announced some other initiatives:

• A commissioned collection called Explorations
• New smart contract it claims saves 65 percent on gas for collectors minting and artists uploading through the platform
• New website 

Late last month, Art Blocks announced that it was sunsetting the series numbers at Series 8, but future submitted projects will still be under the Art Blocks Curated collection.

Art Blocks Factory collection "Glass" by EDG sold out and is trading slightly over the final mint price Monday.

There has been 51 ETH of volume for the collection which sold out in Dutch auction format with a starting price of 2 ETH and a final price around 0.239 ETH. The floor price is 0.27 ETH.

Users can change the pixel density of their NFT on the Art Blocks website. 

Proceeds from the sale go to the ELM Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates the benefits of art therapy.

The floor is 0.32 ETH, as of 2:15 p.m. ET.