First NFT auctions on Tezos (XTZ) take off: Plain colors selling for thousands of dollars

tzcolors

Ethereum started with CryptoKitties, and now the Tezos NFT market has just taken its first leap with tzcolors. What seems to have started as a fun experiment playing around with an auction platform, has taken off fast with thousand dollar bids for plain color NFTs.

The highest sale so far was for about $3,000. And why not? Placing a bid in a Tezos-based dApp costs you $0.01. This sets the stage for what the NFT market on Tezos is going to be like.

The tzcolors team commented:

“The experiment can be considered a success, about 8,000 operations have been done on the Tezos blockchain in a small amount of time. This means the tools were easy enough to use and the entire stack could withstand the load. Also, we received a lot of actionable feedback on the tools, much more than we expected!”

Cause of the color craze

The cause is simple. There is only 1 of each color and this is the first NFT auction ever on Tezos. That factor on itself makes this memorable. But the low fees on Tezos makes this fun. Fees for bidding on tzcolors are about 0.003275XTZ (Currently $0.01).

Bidding itself shouldn’t be an investment. Unfortunately, fees on Ethereum are out of this world currently. An average transaction on Ethereum currently will cost you $19.64. Basic transactions on Tezos will cost you 0.0004 XTZ (Currently $0.0018), which is over 10,000 times cheaper than an average transaction on Ethereum.

More complex transactions like interactions with smart contracts cost more (in the case of tzcolors, $0.01). That is about 2,000 times cheaper than an average transaction on Ethereum.

With this factor in mind, we are looking very closely to the launch of Kalamint, an NFT marketplace that will launch tomorrow. (February 18th).

The colors do have some utility use-case and can be used in the future across Dapps on the Tezos blockchain:

Easy to use

Another factor of its success so far is the fact that the tzcolors platform is simple and easy to use. The platform flow is smooth, simple, and fast.

Currently, you can connect two wallets: Galleon Airgap and Kukai. Galleon is highly respected, Kukai allows you to log in to your wallet with your Twitter, Google, or Reddit account.

At the same time, Kukai is non-custodial. Kukai is where blockchain meets user-friendliness. You can also use Kukai to connect to Tezos’s very first decentralized exchange Dexter.

How does it work?

You place a bid and if no one outbids you in a certain timeframe, you won the auction and you own the NFT of the TzColor. You do need to “claim” your NFT though. This means now you can do with it as you please. Just hold on to it, or set it up for sale again on tzcolors.

Many do put it up for sale to see where the market takes this. TzColors does not charge fees if you sell a color you own. Since these are the first NFT’s on Tezos in auction, we might see some unexpected developments in price in the future. This is crypto after all.

The number of TzColors is fixed to 1680. You can not mint extra colors and set them up for auction. There are three categories: Standard (1530 colors), Epic (128 colors) and Legendary (32 colors). These numbers are set. None will be added for this series. But a second series might be added.

Governance

There are no concrete plans yet, but the idea is to set up a governance feature for the NFT holders and make further decisions about the platform by voting. Things like a possible second series of colors (there are a lot of requests currently for new colors).

But governance will also decide how to distribute the proceeds of the first auction.

“Those funds will be distributed among the teams that created the tooling we used to create tzcolors.”

Top 5 value colors currently:

1. Platinum: 675 tez – tz1WVSQVkC3aYk6FEXzCtnZW2UuSBPg3wgpg – Wed Feb 17 2021 01:52:40 GMT+0100
2. Diamond: 650 tez – tz1WVSQVkC3aYk6FEXzCtnZW2UuSBPg3wgpg – Wed Feb 17 2021 00:45:40 GMT+0100
3. Crystal: 589 tez – tz1LovFrdT3D2uY5ijGnb16172szCqFazDCE – Wed Feb 17 2021 03:05:28 GMT+0100
4. Cola: 460 tez – tz1LovFrdT3D2uY5ijGnb16172szCqFazDCE – Wed Feb 17 2021 03:00:28 GMT+0100
5. Water: 420 tez – tz1ctJighHo6XN64YEmrHy3Fharv7SdkXV99 – Tue Feb 16 2021 23:53:40 GMT+0100

Future use-cases

Initially, there were no current use-cases announced barring the future Dapps utility. So, the colors that are sold are simply collectors’ items of the color itself and of the first NFT auction on Tezos.

But there are future use-cases in development.

“We are currently working on use cases or showcases for the colors outside of the http://tzcolors.io website. So, for example we’re looking into how we can add it to http://tzbutton.io, maybe with a dropdown where you can change the color of the button.

Or, maybe some integration in http://tezblock.io where some UI elements will be colored with your own colors.”

Implementations in other platforms are obviously also possible.

Imagine owners of other NFT’s to be able to set a color filter over NFT’s. For example in collectable card games like Emergents. A badge of honor to set you apart.

Dog Vision

Apparently, the tzcolors team has a sense of humor since they added a “Dog vision” mode to the website. Although dogs see some color, they do see mostly grey.

This post originally appeared on XTZ.news