A few weeks ago it was announced that Matt Kindt would be reviving his acclaimed Mind MGMT series for a one-off story, entitled “The Artifact,” with a catch: the story would be auctioned off as an NFT, or non-fungible token. The auction on opensea.io ended last Wednesday, with a final price of 2.68 Ether, which at the time translated to a little over $5,100, and opensea user goldbera became the owner of a unique, randomly-generated series of numbers that are…somehow…tied to the comic? And something about a blockchain? I’ll be completely honest, I’m still wrapping my head around what an NFT is (aside from a massive energy drain that’s terrible for the environment, that is).
Along with the announcement, Kindt said that a portion of the profits from the sale of the comic would be donated to a then-undetermined environmental agency. This morning Kindt confirmed that 100% of the profits are being donated to the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
At the time of the auction, Kindt said that the winner of the comic could do whatever they want with it, whether it’s keeping it for themselves or sharing it with the world. Well, yesterday afternoon The Beat received an email with the comic attached. And since sharing is caring, here it is.
The comic was sent as one long vertical file, so we’ve broken it up to make it a little more digestible, though it can still be read vertically as originally intended. You can also actually view the whole comic as one file on opensea in goldbera’s gallery/wallet, so even if we hadn’t been specifically sent the comic it would still be out there for anyone to look at, though it looks like the page has only a dozen or so views as of this writing. And the best part is, it’s a completely fungible jpg file, so you can reproduce it digitally to your heart’s content.
In the end, the question remains: was this worth it? Yes, the auction raised over $5,000 for a worthy cause, but was the environmental cost of the minting of the Mind MGMT NFT outweighed by that donation? A post on Medium from December of last year estimates that a single NFT’s carbon footprint is “equivalent to a EU resident’s total electric power consumption for more than a month, with emissions equivalent to driving for 1000Km, or flying for 2 hours.” It seems unlikely that $5,000 will be enough to offset that footprint.
But at least goldbera got their randomly-generated sequence of numbers!
well, that’s a great and ironic jab at NFTs in comic form
Earlier in the article, it said “a portion of the profits” would be donated from the sale the later that the environmental org got over $5K. It can’t be both – please explain. Thanks
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