Evan Van Ness's NFT Auction Lets Winner Tweet From His Account

The web3 community continues to come up with novel use cases for NFTs.

On Oct. 22, Evan Van Ness, a web3 influencer and curator of the “Week in Ethereum” newsletter, launched an auction for an NFT allowing the winning bidder to post one tweet from his personal X account.

The auction is hosted on OpenSea, the top NFT marketplace by trade volume, on the Base Layer 2 network. The auction began at 0.01 ETH (approximately $25) and has received four bids, pushing the price up to 0.02 ETH (roughly $50).

The NFT leverages Teleport, a web3 project from Flashbots that allows users to create programmable, one-time-use links that give access to social media accounts.

Teleport uses trusted-execution-enclaves (TEEs) to ensure that the user who wins the auction cannot exceed the intended scope of use — meaning only a single tweet can be posted from links created using Teleport.

Content moderation

The content of drafted Teleport posts are moderated by an AI large language model (LLM) to prevent users from publishing harmful content.

The LLM will scan the tweet drafted by the winner of Van Ness’s auction to prevent content that is racist, sexist, or involves the shilling of memecoins or particular cryptocurrencies, including BTC, SOL, EOS, IOTA, XRP, and ADA.

“The NFT up for auction has different restrictions, which is namely just that you can’t shill useless crap,” Van Ness tweeted.

0xWave, the current highest bidder in the auction, questioned whether they could author a tweet of excessive length in a bid to conceal content violating the auction’s terms from the LLM.

“Only one way to find out,” Van Ness responded.

NFT adoption declines in Q3

The auction comes as the NFT markets are suffering from sluggish momentum.

According to an Oct. 8 report from DappRadar, combined NFT trade volume plummeted to $1.6 billion in Q3, down 60% from $4 billion in Q2. The NFT number of NFT trades also dropped 23% to $11.5 million from $15 million over the same period.

OpenSea regained its position as the top NFT marketplace in Q3 with $570 million in volume — up 54.5% from $369 in Q2. DappRadar said OpenSea also led by NFT sales count and active users last quarter.

OpenSea overtook Blur, which suffered a 78% decline in volume with $273 million, down from $1.27 billion in Q2. Blur’s decline resulted from its Season 3 incentives winding down, which incentivized wholesale NFT farming.

In the past 24 hours, PikeGirl, CryptoPunks, and Frigana were the top collections by trading volume. PikeGirl led with $1.25 million, followed by CryptoPunks at $807,880, and Frigana at $560,000, according to DappRadar.