Fortune, an American business magazine, has completed its first non-fungible token sale. The magazine announced this news earlier today, noting that the auction took place in the past week. Reportedly, this NFT sale saw the magazine net 429 ETH worth approximately $1.3 million (£0.94 million) at the time.
According to the announcement, the sale comprised two stages. The first part saw Fortune sell 256 limited-edition NFTs of its most recent cover art, designed by a digital artist known as pplpleasr. Each piece in the collection was tokenized and sold for 1 ETH, which was worth approximately $3,000.00 (£2,170.20) at the time. All 256 pieces sold out in a few minutes. Allegedly, anyone looking to resell the art can now fetch a minimum of $21,000.00 (£15,200.85).
The second stage involved a three-day auction of three special-edition NFTs, which featured more detailed graphics. Reportedly, the sale was set to end at 4:00 PM UTC on Monday. However, these auctions did not go as planned, seeing as OpenSea failed to handle the influx of bidders. Reportedly, the marketplace experienced downtime following heavy traffic and started issuing Error 504 pages to people interested in the auction. To this end, a lot of people were unable to place bids.
Fortune plans to hold its ETH
Nonetheless, OpenSea managed to let the sale of one of the special-edition pieces run to completion, regardless of the difficulties. The marketplace paused the other two auctions while trying to stabilize its network. After apologizing for the downtime, OpenSea’s co-founder and CTO, Alex Attalah, and his team got the marketplace back up after a few hours.
As a result of the technical issues, the deadline for the remaining sales had to be moved forward to 7:15 PM UTC.
