In August 2021, Ringer’s #879 became one of the most expensive NFTs ever sold for 1,800 ETH ($5.9 million). Two years later, the NFT of Dmitri Cherniak’s groundbreaking generative art project, affectionately known as the “Goose,” has found a new home for $5.4 million via Sotheby’s Grails: Part II auction.
Knowing the history of Ringers #879 is critical to understanding why it sold for such a high price and why the auction has captivated just about everyone in Web3.
What is Ringer?
Ringers is a collection of 1,000 generative NFTs created by Canadian artist and coder Dmitri Cherniak that was released in January 2021. Each NFT in the collection is derived from a unique transaction hash and generated in Javascript. Released on the well-known generative Web3 platform ArtBlocks, they cost just 0.1 ETH each to mint and sold out in 18 minutes.
The concept – and beauty, many believe – behind Ringers lies in its simplicity; Inspired by the famous Swiss graphic designer Armin Hoffman, Cherniak wanted to create art based on the concept of wrapping string around pegs and was fascinated by the seemingly limitless ways to do it. When run by an algorithm, the variation in the number of pins, location, post size, colors and cover orientation resulted in thousands of visually appealing combinations.
This is one of the reasons why Ringers #879 is considered so valuable. Besides being a happy and unintentional accident created indirectly by the mind of the artist who built the guiding algorithm, the improbability of an animal form arising from the generative randomness contributes to its allure, visual identity and rarity .
“In generative art, the artist dictates the relative probability of a particular attribute appearing in a work of art, but the artist dictates only the probability, not the actual number of times a particular attribute appears,” kate hannaChief Experience Officer of ArtBlocks, explained in a recent video from Sotheby’s describing Cherniak’s work.
The origin of Ringers #879
The story of the goose begins in New York, where a physical version of the piece was printed and signed on July 29, 2021.
Ringers #879 was minted on January 31, 2021 by TheCryptonite, who sold it to pixelpepe for 1.26 ETH just four days later (he also received the physical printout along with the NFT). It was then purchased on August 27, 2021 by Three Arrows Capital, the now-defunct Singapore-based crypto hedge fund, for 1,800 ETH ($5.9 million). In particular, VincentVanDough tried to buy the piece for 500 ETH, but his offer was rejected.
The piece was sold today as a result of the liquidation of Three Arrows Capital.
Web3 emulates the goose
Web3 artists, collectors and curators have been looking forward to the auction for some time and their excitement has been channeled into derivative versions of Ringers #879 leading up to the sale. NFT heavyweights including Beeple, ThankYouX, Alpha Centauri Kid and more joined the trend.