Early this month, the Web3 fundraising platform Gitcoin and Metalabel worked together to make an NFT collection. Because of this, there were rumors for a short time that it was connected to Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.
The art was a tribute to the idea of quadratic funding, which has been used to spread about $70 million in donations to different projects on Gitcoin so far. It had a digital copy of a whitepaper from 2018 that Buterin wrote with economists Glen Weyl and Zo Hitzig and in which they made important contributions to the field.
A Dutch auction was used to sell off twelve limited-edition NFTs, each of which was signed by the author. Kevin Owocki, who started Gitcoin, was upset that some degens on Crypto Twitter said Buterin made the collection.
“I was really dismayed to see on Twitter that people were calling it a Vitalik NFT drop,” he said. “It was basically an artifact of internet history.”
When the open edition mint for the NFT series was about to end on March 8, excitement about it exploded. NFT influencers who were vocal about the idea said on Twitter that Buterin was behind it.
Standard, unsigned NFT from the collection, which could have been made indefinitely for 0.05 ETH, traded on secondary markets like OpenSea for ten times their original price as influencers praised the effort.
Owocki says Buterin’s role in the project was not very important; he only signed the document out of politeness when asked by members of the Gitcoin DAO’s marketing work stream.
Owocki said,“He had nothing to do with the drop, as far as I know. He just signed the paper to be nice to Gitcoin and to help out a little bit.”
The wrong explanation of how the project works shows how quickly hype can grow around NFT projects because people are afraid of missing out and because influential Web3 figures like Buterin can have a lot of power.
Even though $781,000 was raised to support projects on Gitcoin that help the public, Owocki thinks that the project’s good intentions were overshadowed by a sense of misguided excitement.
“To see people shitposting about how this is gonna get you access to Vitalik or his decision making or anything like that kind of—It made me feel like the degens kind of ran away a little bit with the narrative there.”
Content Source: decrypt
