The A to Z of Ethereum, NFT market, and the Tungsten cube bubble

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Tung­sten – A word that peo­ple from the space sel­dom res­onat­ed with has now become the talk of the cryp­to-town owing to its intrigu­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing fea­tures. The cube being talked about is mere­ly 14 inch­es in size and is made of tung­sten. How­ev­er, it weighs a ton [approx­i­mate­ly 907 kg.] due to the den­si­ty of the metal.

Accord­ing to peo­ple from the space, HODLing the cube is an expe­ri­ence like no oth­er. Well, being per­plexed at this point is quite under­stand­able, but it should just be kept in mind that any­thing that’s able to grab the atten­tion of peo­ple has val­ue today.

Over the last few days, peo­ple have been try­ing to fig­ure out the whole cube fren­zy. The Google Trends result speaks for itself. The spikes on the chart below are quite relent­less and the pre­vi­ous spikes bare­ly make their case anymore.

Source: Google Trends

Getting the facts straight

Before pro­ceed­ing with oth­er astound­ing details, it is cru­cial to see how and why this cube saga all started.

Well, Mid­west is a tung­sten ser­vice firm that has been around in the space since 1958 and spe­cial­izes in tung­sten and alloys. Of late, their new­er cube prod­ucts have start­ed to grab a lot of eye­balls. Since the year 2015, the cube has allowed a lot of peo­ple to expe­ri­ence the den­si­ty of tung­sten first hand.

Now tung­sten, as a mat­ter of fact, is a met­al that’s 1.7 times as dense as lead. Savants have been buy­ing it for quite a while and own­ing them has evi­dent­ly been a joke on Red­dit.

Well, the pre­cip­i­tous pop­u­lar­i­ty of these cubes saw Mid­west Tung­sten Service’s sales surge by over 300% in Octo­ber. As per the firm’s offi­cial cus­tomer break­down data, until recent­ly, the major­i­ty of its busi­ness came from indus­tri­al cus­tomers. How­ev­er, the hype pro­voked them to start offer­ing cubes in a host of sizes – right from 1 cm to 10 cm to cater to the needs of its new retail cus­tomer base.

Accord­ing to Midwest’s recent blog, the inter­est in tung­sten cubes pushed the firm to ana­lyze and fig­ure out the biggest cube they could build. Post the intro­spec­tion, its biggest 14-odd inch cube was born.

Gawk-worthy reactions

New own­ers of the cube have already start­ed dra­ma­tiz­ing the whole sit­u­a­tion. One of them went to the extent of assert­ing that their past life, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the wait­ing peri­od, was a ‘bad life.’

By and large, peo­ple are climb­ing onto this cube band­wag­on just not to miss out on the whole cube saga. Well, it was Ether rocks recent­ly and now, they’re tung­sten cubes.

Terms and conditions applied

To keep up with the cryp­to-rel­e­van­cy, Mid­west decid­ed that the tung­sten cube would be sold as an NFT. Own­ers of the NFT would be able to pay an annu­al­ized vis­it to see/photograph/touch the phys­i­cal cube that would be stored at the head­quar­ters of the Mid­west Tung­sten Service.

As per the NFT’s descrip­tion on OpenSea,

“Sub­se­quent own­ers of the NFT can­not vis­it the cube in a year in which the cube has already been visited.”

In fact, the com­pa­ny went on to clar­i­fy that the cube would be stored in a room of its own that would be locked and only be acces­si­ble by the NFT own­er. The cube would addi­tion­al­ly not be avail­able to view until 12 weeks after the first sale. With respect to the deliv­ery, its blog noted,

“Burn­ing the NFT will result in ship­ment to the most recent own­er via freight truck, own­er will be respon­si­ble for alert­ing Mid­west Tung­sten Ser­vice of the inten­tion to burn and trans­port after freight drop-off.”

Bid worth thousands!

The NFT was recent­ly sold to a group named Tung­s­ten­DAO for close to 57 ETH, approx­i­mate­ly worth $250k. Even though what the group intends to do with the NFT is not known, it more or less seems like the pur­chase was made to bring the DAO to the spotlight.

The group describes itself as an “exper­i­men­tal meme incu­ba­tion stu­dio” and aims to “amass a col­lec­tion of assets that are high­ly mem­o­rable, then cre­ate con­tent that rein­forces their social sig­nif­i­cance and strength­ens memet­ic desires for these assets.”

Source: OpenSea

Well, a few claim that the den­si­ty of the cube, along with the intangible/immaterial nature of NFTs, make a per­fect com­bi­na­tion. While for oth­ers, the expe­ri­ence of HODLing these objects is its own reward. The most straight­for­ward and appeal­ing answer, how­ev­er, advo­cates that the block is being bought to grat­i­fy one’s meme-bones.

Will Tung­s­ten­DAO become the first mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar meme stu­dio? Will the cube hype con­tin­ue to last? Even though the answer to the afore­men­tioned ques­tions is like­ly not, no one from the space can claim it with sure­ty. Giv­en the ever-chang­ing trends, a cuboid or per­haps a sphere might soon end up dethron­ing the cube.

NFTs are rev­o­lu­tion­ary by them­selves, but the trends these days are get­ting out of hand. And, looks like the cube is mere­ly anoth­er one try­ing to bite the dust.



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