OldGods Remastered — the condensed version

If you are here, you probably already know that on 25 February my first NFT collection will be auctioned through EverPay gasless, cross-chain auction mechanism.

This is the final stage of a 5-month journey that started from a lump of wet clay. The entire reasoning of my collection will be explained extensively in a future article. Lets say that it has to do with both long past times and the future.

Now I will try to focus on pinpointing some facts:

The auction will exhibit 9 3D objects. Each represents the last phase of 9 clay figurines: they were handcrafted from two different types of natural clay (one without any traces of iron that becomes white after burning and one that contains iron and becomes red), dried, with various degrees of stone polishing, burnt in order to become ceramics with 2 different techniques (the “normal” one that lets the air to interact with the pieces and favor the oxidation process, and one that basically turns the clay into black pottery), partially destroyed, restored, some of them were decorated with kaolin inlays and ultimately 3D scanned.

The NFTs will be minted on ETH mainnet through a custom Manifold smart contract and the files and metadata will be forever stored on Arweave.

Besides the perks offered by EverPay, both utility wise, and auction wise, I will create the following system to distribute the physical pieces:

• One physical piece will be given at the end of the auction and will be the one associated with the NFT that will be sold for the highest price of all the 9 NFTs. When this NFT will be sold for 3x the value from the primary market, the buyer from the secondary market will receive another 1/1 NFT made by me.
• The rest of the 8 physical pieces will be given in the secondary market when each remaining NFT will be sold for 3x the primary market price. Evidently, they will be given to the buyers from the secondary market.

Quick notes:

• Each participant to the auction should provide his/hers Twitter handle in a field solicited by EverPay. I will contact the highest bidder in order to establish the details of the shipping.
• For the shipments of the piece from the secondary market, I expect direct messages from the addresses that bought the NFTs with at least 3x the initial market value through the blockscan chat facilitated by etherscan.
• Given the fact that the auction will be held in AR$ ( and wAR$) and that on the secondary market the NFTs will be traded in ETH, I will take as a reference for calculating the 3X value, the conversion of the AR$ prices for each NFT to ETH$ value at the end of the auction.
• If for any reason, one buyer won’t want to receive the physical, it will be reported for the next buyer that will meet the required 3X increase.

Why this system? Because I believe that in this way I can assure from the beginning a decent life of this collection in the secondary market, offering further incentives down the line.

The packaging of the physicals

Don’t expect a figurine wrapped in bubble foil. You will have to dig for them… literally. They will be all buried in individual wooden boxes, beneath different layers of dirt. It’s all about the context. I will provide some basic “instructions” and archeological tools for offering the capability of digging the pieces in an archeological manner through a technique named “stratigraphy”. If one will take some pictures throughout the process and document the dig, I will probably grant him/her a special NFT. Obviously, one can choose to not dig it at all and resell it too.

Last words

I went through countless iterations until I choose this way of minting the tokens and conducting the auction. I hope that I managed to assure a certain balance between the art and the token.

I don’t know how the auction will conclude, it was a long way, mostly done alone, but there were people, some of them I don’t even know how they look, that provided me the support needed to pull this through. They are the living proof that in crypto art and in crypto in general, there are real humans with real values. I want to thank JohnnyDollar, MaxOsiris, and Mimnermos. Each knows why. I want to thank Beni for leveraging his 20 years of experience in filming and video processing throughout the entire period of OGR creation.

I want to thank EverFinance’s team for taking the bet with an unknown guy and letting me use their auction system for my genesis collection.

Finally, I want to thank Arweave News for taking me in and displaying unprecedented amounts of patience in the last weeks. If Arweave ecosystem is my Web3 tribe, then Arweave News is my Web3 family.