Scarcity And Rewards

Scarcity and artwork go hand in hand. It is the unwritten language of future artwork potential that can drive purchase. In the digital art world, the idea of scarcity for art is relatively new. After all, right click and save gets you unlimited digital copies right? Not in the NFT art space.

Scarcity and rewards is the feature of today's MintFace article, exploring through the lens of Alpha Centauri Kid encouraging artwork burning, an artwork giveaway by Alex Lavrov and accidental mint scarcity by CryptoArte.

First we start with an art giveaway by Alex Lavrov.

MintFace Artist Sale Feature - Alex Lavrov

Surrealism. Cubism. Expressionism. Psychological Symbolism

Alex Lavrov is created a special 100 edition digital artwork as a reward for his early collectors and announced it on Twitter.

Alex's work to date has been supported thanks to 71 collectors on the OpenSea platform. His most recent sales on OpenSea include 'The Past', 'Self Isolation', 'Shapeshifting', 'Busy Women' and 'The Lineup'. Each of these collectors will be eligble for his digital artwork giveaway.

How does Alex know who purchased his work on OpenSea? The trading history reveals who the artwork was sent to. For Alex to airdrop the 100 edition dogs and birds freebie, he will need to go through the trading history of each of  'to' addresses and digitally send a copy of the artwork to 'SeastheDay777', 'Chinyasuhail', 'D744A1' and so on until all 71 current owners are rewarded.

Each owner of an Alex Lavrov work receives this beauty called 'Dogs and Birds'. Wow.

So how might you adopt Alex's generosity to reward your art patrons? Simple. Figure out the number art owners across all NFT platforms. Decide what digital artwork to airdrop, announce, snapshot who owns what at a specific time and then airdrop your art!

The roadmap aspect simply promises the giveaway in advance to encourage collectors to buy your work earlier for the promise of more later. The benefit of surprising your collectors like Alex has is the delight in being unexpectedly being rewarded for your good taste in his art.

The surprise and delight of unexpected airdrops is more powerful than a promised 'roadmap', at least for a giveaway.

MintFace Burn Feature - Alpha Centauri Kid

3D musical glitch art fanatic

We have featured Alpha Centauri Kid's work before in the Crypto Aesthetic article. He deserves another mention here because of his active consideration on how to lower all editions and increase value for everyone.

The ingenuity at play is in how he plays with scarcity and collecting, leaving his art buyers to decide what to buy, what to keep, what to burn and what to exchange.

Let's look at the two stages of scarcity individually.

Availability Scarcity
You had to be in the Alpha Centauri Discord channel to discover it's going on (or be pretty quick on the jump following Alpha Centauri on Twitter) and be available on the 14th August 2021 when a red 'Glitch Bomb' and blue 'Glitch Bomb' 25 edition artwork were made available to purchase for just 0.25 if....you got through a few hoops:

Form Scarcity

1. Had your public address picked in Discord or filled in the Google form posted in Discord with your details.
2. If you were picked you got an invite to a private sale of either the red 'Not Gonna Drink It' Glitch Bomb or blue 'We're All Gonna Drink It' Glitch Bomb artwork version...but crucially, not both.

Pair Scarcity

In the week that followed, owners of reds were searching for blues and vice versa.
Because if you only got a red or a blue edition artwork together you could swap for a new unannounced artwork. Decisions being debated were:

Do you keep the blue or sell it to someone who needs a blue?
Do you keep the red or sell it to someone who needs a red?
Do you try and get another blue or another red to make a pair?

I can't stress enough the importance of how these newly introduced decisions are completely foreign to the old art world.

Decision Time

Assuming you made it through all those hoops...proving your real status as an Alpha Centauri fan... you then got to decide.

Decide to burn (yes burn) both of your red and blue artworks in exchange for a brand new even rarer Alpha Centauri burn token.

There's a 30 day decision window and as of writing this article. As of 17th August at 7:44am PST 4 blue and red sets have been burned.

What I haven't covered here, is what the value of each digital artwork might be worth when all the people who are going to burn have burned. That's part of the fun of deciding which of the three groups to end up in. Three questions I'd be asking as a collector.

1. Of the 50 blue and reds, how many of each will be left when the burn window closes?
2. How many burn tokens will be created?

If it was purely for the art (and I believe that should always be a consideration), then I would choose the blue WAGMI Glitch Bomb artwork.  Pro tip: Always community over failed transaction!

Of course, do your own research, or just ape in and buy both the blue and red from a collector like JBC that's done the hard work.

JBC is also transferring his art back to ACK for burning to receive a burn token.

Red NGMI burn token - failed transaction
Blue WAGMI burn token - community

What would you do?

MintFace Artwork Feature - Accidental Scarcity

Antique NFT's mostly got lost to the annals of time until they got rediscovered again in 2021 by many new to the digital art scene. That created some accidental scarcity for art projects that began pre 2018...but just sorta tapered off.

Seb's CryptoArte project only had about 26% of the digital art minted from the CryptoArte site from 2018 to 2021...and then suddenly, in early August 2021, just after MintFace published this article, a new surge of demand meant the whole collection got minted.

Two weeks later and every single CryptoArte work is sold out. Now, you can only buy CryptoArte on the secondary OpenSea market.

Back to the story...the pause in mass minting until 2021 created accidental scarcity for the CryptoArte project. The key insight is that while the entire project is 'rare' the most 'rare' is digital art that has a mint date of 2018/2019 or even 2020. There a smaller number of each:

2018 494
2019 873
2020 10
2021 everything else.

Source: etheria

If you're looking for a rare year, go for 2020 CryptoArte. If you're looking for early generative art, like pre AutoGlyph stuff...go for 2018 and around 545 of the CryptoArte works minted in 2019.

Verify the mint date in the trading history to check before buying a CryptoArte. It should say '2 years ago' or '3 years ago'

You can also using this OpenSea search filter I've created just for MintFace subscribers which shows all the older mints.

Pro tip: if you're not a MintFace subscriber, subscribe to MintFace now.

Technical stuff yes... but the assumption is that real art galleries when they catch on to this, will curate based on these technicalities.

Bonus Accidental Scarcity - Etheria

There are plenty of others. Etheria is worth delving into if you've got a spare 20 hours.

The project pre-dates CryptoPunks by a full two years.

...and it's back in fashion.

Pro pro tip: New scarcity is occurring all the time. No one is using Ubiq for digital artwork yet...but quite soon, it might be possible according to Robek.World.

If this article has made you curious about getting started with digital art, we also run the Digital Artist Economy workshop helping artists create their first digital art through a three week programme. Share it with an artist you'd like to see on an NFT marketplace.

MintFace surfaces great artists and artworks so you don't have to.

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