Firsts are always special, ain’t they? Since yesterday, there have been a lot of discussions going around about who will mint the very first NFT on the Ethereum network post the Merge. A host of open contentions had been made on social platforms like Twitter.
Now, with the Merge having successfully taken place already, the first mint has also materialized. A particular user has paid 36.8 ETH, roughly $60k to mint the first NFT on the Ethereum blockchain post its transition to the proof of stake consensus mechanism. The transaction took place on block 15537394, within seconds after the network upgrade.
The nitty-gritty
The NFT is, notably, named ‘The Transition,’ and is essentially a panda mascot. The said collection has a total of 100 tokens on OpenSea.
As shown below, the NFT encapsulates details with respect to the edition, chain ID, and Ethereum’s block number, the difficulty level, base fee, and timestamp at the time of minting.
A newly set up account on Twitter, The Transition, claims to have executed the first transaction to buy the NFT. Per the website link on the account’s Twitter bio, The Transition is an on-chain generative NFT collection intended to “mark a milestone on the path” towards decentralization. Furthermore,
“The entire collection was minted by the deployer at position 0 of the `TRANSITION_BLOCK`. The mint is transaction is the first Ethereum transaction under Proof-of-Stake consensus.”
Here it is also worth noting that NFTs from the said collection is being auctioned. Per website details, the entire collection was transferred to an entirely self-sustained Auction House contract at the time of mint.
Also, to honor Ethereum, the Auction House contract has been configured to recognize two privileged addresses—that of Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation. At any given time, these said addresses can claim all the remaining editions for which an auction has not started.
Also Read: Post Merge, can Ethereum become a profitable alternative to U.S bonds?