Fortune Raises $1.3 Million in First-Ever NFT Auction

The popular US business magazine, Fortune hosted its first-ever NFT auction last week, with a set of 256 limited edition NFTs, along with 3 special-edition tokens. Fortune announced the extraordinary collection of 429 ETH, i.e., over $1.3 million from sales of its first auction.

NFT auction divided into two phases

Fortune’s NFT auction was divided into two categories. The former auction offered 256 limited edition NFTs of its latest cover art, designed by the digital artist pplpleasr. According to the company, each NFT was sold for 1 ETH. The first phase with 256 NFTs was sold out within a few minutes as revealed by Fortune’s Data Sheet newsletter. Furthermore, the company highlighted that these NFTs are currently being re-sold for a minimum of seven times the original auction rates.

The latter half of the auction was three-day-long and comprised of three special editions NFTs, that featured precise and in-depth graphics. The last day of the auction saw the biggest sale of the final NFT for 105 ETH, i.e., over $300,000.

Fortune to hold ETH from NFT auction sales

Regardless, the exceptional collection from its first-ever auction, Fortune’s chief financial officer, Anastasia Nyrkovskaya, conveyed her intentions to hold the sales collection in Ether itself instead of liquidating right away.

OpenSea glitch at Fortune’s first NFT auction

Fortune’s first NFT auction experienced surprisingly high sales, but it also witnessed technical errors in lieu of heavy traffic. The auction was hosted on OpenSea marketspace and because of massive traffic, the platform kept circling back to “Error 504”. This further caused the dropping of many auction bids.

“We got flooded with traffic that appears to be somewhat related to the auction… [D]ue to DoS [denial of service] attacks that occurred during the auctions, we were unable to process some bids for Chad 1 and 3,”, shared OpenSea.

NFT market has gained considerable popularity this year and it only seems to be going on an upwards streak. More players are joining the NFT sphere to upgrade and adapt in accordance with digitization for Web 3.0. Sports legends, multi-million-dollar art galleries; commercial giants like Coca-Cola, and even High-fashion brands have incorporated NFTs into their marketing plans of 2021, and the list is only getting longer and more expensive.