High Bid on NFT of Ethereum’s Final PoW Block Is Just One-Third What Creators Paid to Mint It

The entirety of Ethereum’s final block before it shifted to a proof-of-stake network Thursday morning was captured in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). But the market isn’t valuing “The Last POW Block” as much as its creators likely did, at least so far.

VanityBlocks, a relatively new NFT collection, paid some 30 ether, or just over $48,000, in fees to crypto miner F2Pool, which mined the final transaction, to mint the NFT, paying some 1.3 ether ETH$3,038.23 as transaction fees. However, the NFT had received just three bids as of Thursday at roughly 15:00 UTC, with the highest bidder, OpenSea user “lossy-eth,” offering just 10 ether. Lossy’s bid was about five times that offered by Nostalgia_NFT, which bid just 2 ether. Meanwhile, “cryptogle” bid just 0.5 ether. All three bids are currently active on VanityBlocks’ OpenSea page.

CoinDesk Special Coverage: The Ethereum Merge

VanityBlocks publishes transactional data onto an entire block – a novelty that allows holders to effectively "own" a block. Blocks are datasets where transactional data in a blockchain are permanently recorded and contain some or all of the most recent transactions on that network.

The project even included a quote by American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna in the final PoW transaction: "Make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick.”

VanityBlocks' founder "monkeyontheloose.eth" remains unfazed, however, by the low bids. He told CoinDesk in a Twitter message that the project only had a "15% chance to actually mint that block and still managed to do it," adding that the U.S. East Coast was only just waking up – meaning the NFT was likely to see much more bidding attention as the day progressed.

Meanwhile, the first NFTs minted on the proof-of-stake Ethereum network aren’t attracting much interest either.

Creators behind “The Transition” collection, which hopes to “mark a milestone on the path towards decentralization,” paid some 36 ether, or over $53,000, in transaction fees this morning to mint the first-ever NFTs on Ethereum after the Merge.

NFTs of this collection have received bids of only up to 1.76 ether, or just over $2,300, data from the collection’s site shows.

Read more: The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second-Biggest Blockchain