The Defiant

Gitcoin's Metalabel Drop Tops OpenSea Charts

Major NFT Collector Corners More Than A Quarter Of Supply

By: Owen Fernau Loading...

Gitcoin's Metalabel Drop Tops OpenSea Charts

An NFT collection with official participation from Vitalik Buterin dropped last week as part of the public launch of a new platform called Metalabel.

Gitcoin Presents now leads all NFT collections with 3,748 ETH ($5.4M) in trading volume over the past 24 hours, according to Nansen.

A special, limited edition of 12 NFTs that promise signed physical editions has surged to a floor price of 58 ETH, over $82,000 as of Mar. 9, and up nearly 20x from the mint price of 3 ETH.

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Gitcoin Presents’ Limited Edition NFT

The first Metalabel release is a seminal paper from 2018 which introduced the concept of quadratic funding, written by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and economists Zoe Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl.

Notably, because of the Ethereum co-founder’s involvement in the project, Crypto Twitter is referring to the collection as a “Vitalik NFT.”

Gitcoin Presents launched on Metalabel on Mar. 1. The collection, called a “record,” was an Open Edition. This means that, outside of the exclusive 12 NFTs, an unlimited amount of the token was mintable during a set window of time. Minting is now closed, with 9,209 of the Open Edition NFTs minted at 0.05 ETH per token.

After rocketing above 0.6 ETH on Mar. 9, the floor price of the collection has settled at 0.4 ETH, generating a 700% return for minters.

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Floor Price Since Launch

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Over $600K Raised

Roughly $663,000 was raised from the Open Edition drop, taking into account ETH’s drop in price to $1,440.

Of that amount, 70% went to the Gitcoin Grants Matching Pool, which is used to pay out grants on the Gitcoin platform, 20% went to the Plurality Institute, an organization working in the human coordination space, and 10% went to the Metalabel platform.

To Scott Moore, the co-founder of Gitcoin, which uses quadratic funding to raise money for public goods, the drop was a resounding success and a reminder of what he values in the Ethereum community.

“To me, [the] success of this drop is an uplifting reminder that people really do care about internet-native public goods,” he told The Defiant. “Just like in a city, in the Ethereum ecosystem, we all need to work together to build the kind of world we want to see.”

Indeed, Gitcoin, the primary organization behind the drop, has been instrumental in pioneering the concept of public goods, which in the context of crypto means a product or service which provides value to the world but isn’t truly owned by anyone.

Gitcoin’s quadratic funding mechanism has been responsible for over $19M in distributed funds, according to the site WTF is QF. Quadratic funding is a form of allocating capital by quadratically weighting votes, meaning that votes from smaller holders carry more weight.

Machi Corners The Market

There are some other aspects of the NFT collection’s launch which may be less than ideal.

A major NFT trader known as Machi Big Brother has bought up a huge amount of Gitcoin Presents’ supply — as of Mar. 9, he owns 2,389 of the NFTs, over 25% of the total supply, according to Nansen.

Moore isn’t enthused by the trader’s major stake in the project but isn’t hyper-concerned either. “One challenge with any drop is that you’ll always have some whales buying up supply, and while I think that kind of activity is wrong, at least in this case, it supports the public good,” he said.

The percentage of the project which Machi Big Brother owns is bound to change too, as the trader is rapidly buying and selling the NFTs, according to Etherscan, a source for blockchain data. The trader has been actively farming the BLUR airdrop, which could account for his apparent lack of concern for losses incurred.

Regardless, the Gitcoin Presents drop has certainly helped Metalabel gain awareness. Metalabel’s seven co-founders include Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler, as well as the founder of Etsy.

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