With a possible billion-dollar nonfungible token drop and a high-powered, multiproject collaboration in the works, the Ethereum ecosystem may finally exist ready to compete with NFT-centric blockchain Flow.

In a press release today, Ethereum software programmer ConsenSys appear Palm, an environmentally friendly NFT scaling solution. Palm volition be a sidechain designed to exist "fully connected" to Ethereum, sporting faster settlement times, lower fees and an specially light carbon footprint — a noted bugaboo for artists as of late.

Ethereum's community — ane of the concatenation's advantages over the faster, more than efficient rival NFT chain Menstruation — is besides on total display in the release. ConsenSys announced a lineup of ecosystem-building partner powerhouses for Palm, such as NFT social media platform Nifty'southward and experimental NFT mining project Meme.

Likewise, Palm volition come up out of the gate with meaning infrastructure in place from partners Infura, NFT metadata storage via Protocol Labs, and a partnership with decentralized exchange Uniswap, which may soon be announced equally the home of the forthcoming PALM token initial exchange offering.

The question is: Will this exist enough to overcome Flow and its wildly pop, manufacture-altering NBA Height Shot collectibles?

All virtually the IP

Technical and ecosystem differences aside, the battle betwixt the NFT platforms will ultimately be fought over the quality of the intellectual belongings and the licensing they can attract.

So far, the Ethereum community has been fed a thin nutrition on that front. Ethereum-native platforms have been fighting for NFTs from C-listing celebrities, sports has-beens or never-weres, and niche — if highly devoted — fandoms.

Flow, meanwhile, has been one of the driving forces behind NFTs entering mainstream consciousness, primarily due to the massive success of National Basketball Association-licensed NBA Pinnacle Shot.

The projection seems to break its ain records weekly, is existence discussed regularly on ESPN and sells out like clockwork the moment it releases new packs. If you've been seeing NFTs on the nightly news, Top Shot is to give thanks.

Menstruation's atomic number 82 isn't unsurpassable, however, as Palm's opening salvo in the platform wars could be every bit as lucrative as Height Shot: a meatspace-meets-blockchain physical-and-NFT fine art mashup chosen "The Currency Project" from legendary British creative person Damien Hirst.

"The Currency" brings the currency

Outset reported by Cointelegraph, The Currency Project consists of 10,000 physical "bills" painted by Hirst 5 years ago and currently in storage. Each bill will have slightly different features — and therefore, rarities — and will be tied to an NFT, meaning it'due south conceptually similar to algorithmically generated NFT art projects, from a collector'due south perspective.

Calculating the possible value of The Currency Project is ultimately educated guesswork. Ane method might be to look at similar projects: Using investment funds designed to track a handbasket of NFTs, one back-envelope estimate puts the electric current aggregate market value of all 10,000 CryptoPunks — one of the earliest and most popular algorithmically generated NFT projects — at $500 million. Besides, a more recent algorithmically generated project, Hashmasks, managed to raise over $10 one thousand thousand for merely over 16,000 NFTs over the course of four days in January.

Meanwhile, Hirst himself is a famously remunerative brand to bring to market — if not e'er through cut-and-dry out means. One Hirst piece, "For the Love of God" — a human skull encrusted with some number of diamonds — was put upwards for sale in 2007 for 50 million pounds. It somewhen sold, just for an undisclosed sum to an buying group that included Hirst himself.

Hirst has also held the record for the most expensive single piece of art sold by a living artist at various points in his life (a record that digital artist and common fanboy Beeple challenged earlier this calendar month), and Hirst's personal record to shell for a collection similar The Currency Project is $198 one thousand thousand — the sum his "Beautiful Within My Head Forever" show fetched at sale at Sotheby's in 2008, though a more recent sale might take brought in equally much equally a full billion.

Investors shouldn't but assume wild success for The Currency Projection, nevertheless. A like physical-fine art-and-NFT mashup sale of a painting from avant-garde main Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine is currently on auction at Mintable, and bids appear to take stalled out at $35,000 with just a solar day to get — a paltry sum given the historic nature of the sale. Some fine art outlets reported that Baranoff-Rossine had fallen out of collectors' favor leading up the sale, and it now appears that simply calculation an NFT element to a sale is non sufficient to realign wider market place trends.

So, The Currency Project will be worth some figure betwixt $35,000 and a billion? Properly triangulating the nature and quality of the various projects, the competing profligacy of the fine art and crypto communities, and how Hirst's opaque sales history might interpret to the cryptoland would, in aggregate, require a supercomputer or a prophet, or both.

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Hirst implied this dubiousness is role of the conceptual ability of the projection.

"Each NFT is an artwork and each physical artwork is a piece of work of art, but I can't help seeing the whole projection as a single and powerful work of art. Anyone who buys, sells or holds the NFTs and/or the concrete artworks will be participating in this work of art themselves. I have no idea what is going to happen, where the value or the belief lies, I can't predict what is going to be more valuable, less valuable and how the whole project will be received, but I love the limitlessness and the thrill of the projection and that every participant will contribute to the overall complexity of this artwork in some fashion through their behaviour."

By this standard, The Currency Project will be an experiment indeed.

A license to license

Whatsoever its (likely mammoth) marketplace capitalization, Palm will need more i headline-grabbing Hirst project to properly compete with Flow. To that finish, ConsenSys has assembled a pair of high-powered partners: Joe Hage and David Heyman.

Hage, once described by ARTnews as a "significant just rarely discussed force behind the scenes" of the fine art world, brings more than than his friendship and business relationship with Hirst to Palm. Hage was quoted in the press release as saying that he too has collaborations with multiple "artists and art institutions" in the works. Hage is a noted powerbroker of Gerhard Richter, the nigh successful artist ever at auction, and runs an sectional fine art law firm with 2 former top Sotheby's attorneys.

Hage's first venture into crypto was also an unmitigated success: He was the driving force behind Hirst accepting Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) for a print run of cherry blossom paintings sold through Hage's print shop, Heni — a run that earned over $22 million in total, well exceeding expectations.

Source: Science Ltd

Heyman, meanwhile, is another prime example of a "significant but rarely discussed" private, though his expertise is in picture. His company produced Gravity and In one case Upon a Time in Hollywoodas well as the Harry Potter series.

A scattering of projects have managed to leverage licensing of fondly remembered brands for successful drops, including WAX's Garbage Pail Kids run and Terra Virtua's recent Godzilla vs. Rex Kong drop. Except for Menstruation and the NBA, no platform has even sniffed the kind of IP conquering that Harry Potter, ane of the well-nigh widely loved (and assisting) franchises ever, would represent.

The printing release did not estimate a date for either Palm's launch or Hirst's NFT drop and provided few specifics on future planned acquisitions and drops.

If Palm wants to cut into Flow's significant lead, however, nosotros tin can expect it will be moving sooner rather than later.