The Big Bang — Charged Particles Launch Party Recap
Last week saw one of the most exciting Metaverse events to date and oh boy, is there a lot to talk about — exclusive musical performances, kickstarted careers, 10-minute collection sell-outs, shiny POAPs, an audience that pushed the limits of Cryptovoxels, yield-multiplying Lepton NFTs, and an artist’s success despite the best efforts of the Nigerian government.
First Thing’s First — What is Charged Particles?
An exciting new project at the intersection of DeFi and NFTs, Charged Particles lets you do more with your NFTs by enabling users to ‘energize’ their non-fungible digital assets with any ERC-20 token. This means interest-bearing art with intrinsic value as well as speculative value, programmable in-game assets with functionality and provable ownership, the transfer of entire crypto portfolios in a single transaction, unique community-building opportunities with social-token-loaded NFTs, and much much more.
Charged Particles is backed by top web3 investors in the space, and the Protocol & DApp are NOW LIVE!
Read more about the limitless possibilities of Charged Particles here.
The Main Event
On Wednesday, February 17th, nearly 2,000 unique visitors joined us in celebrating the launch of the protocol in the Token Smart Discord server and in two Cryptovoxels parcels designed specifically for the event by Richard Dixon. As far as we’re aware, in the world of Metaverse events, this turnout has been dwarfed only by the recent B.20/Beeple event “Metapalooza,” another Token Smart success. The Big Bang was indeed such a banger that Cryptovoxels needed to take a cheeky little reset— twice!
The event opened with the first of two exclusive musical performances by IMT who also released and sold-out their deluxe album “Toot The Bad Horn.” They also released, in a first for the world of Music NFTs, full distribution rights to 4 unreleased songs which is available here (5 song EP included), but not for long.
More than a few of the anonymous avatars displayed their hottest in-game dance moves while the duo performed an original set of never-released music that fuses live horns, live looping, and house music. Rumor has it that another exciting Metaverse musical collaboration is in the works … but I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Up next was a presentation by yours truly introducing all the amazing art on sale and the exciting incentives for those who arrived. In the next week more than 75k CHARGE tokens (our community social token) will be distributed to participants alongside the commemorative POAP token and a special POAP NFT for those lucky 100 who signed the guest list quickest!
The mainstage area featured the IMT album drop and 6 themed Charged Particles pieces by Qwercus, Magusz, BufoBats, DuckingWhimsical, Asithos, Shytoshi Kusama, and TokenDesigner. (These pieces and other selections at the bottom of the article)
The Charged Particles NFT Gallery had collections by our seven featured artists — Anthony Azekwoh, Alana Edgington, Danil Pan, Ji Hoon Yeo, MxJxn, Richard Dixon, and SurrealSerptentine. Their art, ranging in medium from oil paint to digital illustration and in theme from poetic abstraction to realistic portraiture, covered the three-floor gallery with over 40 pieces of unique work.
In one hour and a half, those artists had made 101.25 ETH(~$190,000)
If you were looking for the next big stars of the NFT scene… well, there are 15 of them for you.
Three of these artists, Anthony Azekwoh, Ji Hoon Yeo, and Alana Edgington, were debuting their first-ever NFT collections, and their success is worth highlighting.
Anthony Azekwoh, a Nigerian artist and author, sold out his entire collection in some 10 minutes. Minted last, gone first. His shock at the quick 5+ ETH turnaround, however, lasted much longer. After realizing his pieces had vanished, he quickly minted another one (which is still available)
In the context of a Nigeria whose central government has just made the exchange of cryptocurrencies into the local Naira an impossibility, this introduction into the NFT world (and a veritable steal for the collectors of an artist sure to make shockwaves) was like a light switch going off. I had a chance to catch up with Anthony as we were all decompressing.
“In a country that has decided to go above and beyond in the opression of its citizens, cryptoart is a much needed Hail Mary. It gives freedom, ease of access, payment, and a booming industry — things we’ve never truly experienced here”
-Anthony Azekwoh
Our other first-time NFT artists, Ji Hoon Yeo and Alana Edgington had a tight battle for top-seller that ended with a respective 26 and 25 ETH total sales at the launch party alone. Their pieces, both integrating physical paintings with NFTs, are an early display of the connection between the Metaverse and our default physical experience. Alana’s pieces are embedded with microchips that you can scan to bring up the NFT, and Ji Hoon’s QR-code-linked pieces will donate 35% of all locked interest to the charity “Save The Children.”
With one piece, “Spring, Out of Window,” going for 15 ETH ($30,000 at the time of writing), Ji Hoon’s art career is surely kickstarted and, in less than a week since the launch party, Alana has shot her total up to 36 ETH. It seems like collectors are still hunting the genesis pieces from all of our featured creators.
Ji Hoon, who is now building a digital presence and will be releasing new information soon about upcoming collections, had this to say:
“First of all, I am very grateful for the opportunity I had last week selling my pieces on Charged Particles. It was a life changing moment for me. If things are working, I will keep developing my art career in crypto-world.”
-Ji Hoon Yeo
Remaining work from the genesis art drop:
MxJxn — Reaching The Source
Danil Pan — Odyssey Through The Mist
Ji Hoon Yeo — Ordinary Life
IMT— Toot The Bad Horn
Alana Edgington — Singularity Collection
Anthony Azekwoh — New Beginnings
Leptons — NFTs With Super Powers
The next major piece of the launch party puzzle came in the form of subatomic particles. A unique offering made possible by the Charged Particles protocol, Leptons are NFTs that multiply your liquidity yield.
By depositing these increasingly scarce NFTs inside another NFT on the Charged Particles DApp, mining rewards for our upcoming governance token can be multiplied by up to 310% — a functionality that is first-of-its-kind in the space.
These NFTs are limited, especially now that bulk buying up to 25 NFTs at a time has been enabled, so don’t miss your chance! Read in more depth about Leptons here.
Click here to buy a Lepton (or 25)!
Interested In Making Art On Our Platform?
Artists are welcome to start minting, energizing, and selling their work from our website — app.charged.fi — and we’ve even made a handy guide for getting started.
We’ll be featuring individual pieces several times a week and a very special front page spotlight to a handful of selected artists every few weeks. If you are interested in a featured position, use the platform, tweet out your work, and be sure to tag us! We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for not only excellent art but also creative uses of the protocol as well as brand new artists — everyone is welcome!
Find Out More
Web: http://charged.fi/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DefiNft
Discord: https://discord.gg/HdRx4SBMDv
Telegram: https://t.me/chargedparticles
ART FROM THE LAUNCH — A MICRO GALLERY
