Crypto Project Uses Whole Ethereum Blocks and Turns Them into NFTs

A new crypto project called VanityBlocks is dedicating whole Ethereum blocks for the single purpose of turning them into NFTs. The project is using the blocks to mint NFTs that will be forever tied to that specific block.

The first Genesis NFT was created on January 16 in block 14017777. The transaction to create the NFT took up the entire block, costing around 5.31 ether, or US$16,600 at the time of writing.

A more recent mint took place on January 31 for block 14114114, costing over 3.42 ETH (about US$10,700) in transaction fees. To date, VanityBlocks only has minted these two blocks, available on OpenSea.

OpenSea has, however, also recently experienced problems when an update left some creators unable to mint new NFTs.

Second NFT Sold for Twice the Price

The second of the NFTs has already been sold to an eager buyer for 7 ETH (about US$21,000) on the same day it was minted. To put in perspective the magnitude of using up an entire Ethereum block, one block can hold between a few to several hundred transactions depending on the size of each transaction.

Transactions on the Ethereum network are designed to cost more if they contain more code, a method used to deter spam. In this particular case, the code was designed to keep performing more operations until it hit a certain amount of gas used. As a result, the transaction for each NFT maxed out the 20 million gas limit, meaning that no other transactions could fit in each block:

The only transaction in each block is the one minting the NFT, and the NFTs show the same image of a pair of eyes on a black background.

In the NFT metadata, it contains the block number it was mined in. The concept is that each NFT represents the block it was mined in, making it represent a part of the Ethereum blockchain.