By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 25th, 2024
VanityBlocks are in no way a cheap means to mint an NFT as the team had to pay nearly $50,000 to mint an NFT on the last block of Ethereum PoW.
VanityBlocks team has put the last Ethereum block that was mined before the network’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) to good use, this follows after the block was used to mint a single non-fungible token (NFT) at the cost of nearly $50,000.
VanityBlocks Mints NFT on the Last Ethereum PoW Block
The NFT, called “The Last PoW Block”, is so large that it took up the entire block, leaving no space for any other transaction. However, this is common with all VanityBlocks NFTs. And just like other NFTs in the collection, the Last PoW Block also shows a pair of eyes staring out from a black background.
Meanwhile, in his remarks, VanityBlocks founder, MonkeyOnTheLoose has admitted that the team is astonished by the project. He claims that although they had been working on it for over a month, they never thought it was achievable. This explains why the Last PoW Block also contains some of the following text:
“You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.”
It is worth mentioning that VanityBlocks are in no way a cheap means to mint an NFT. To put that into perspective, VanityBlocks paid 31 ETH ($49,600) directly to mining pool F2Pool to mint the NFT in question. It also spent an extra 1.3 ETH on transaction fees. However, the cost would not hurt so much as MonkeyOnTheLoose claims they had raised 70 ETH from investors before.
Post-Merge Update
There is still a buzz in and around the crypto community as the most anticipated crypto event of 2022 – The Merge – took place at 6:44 a.m. UTC today. The event saw Ethereum transitioning from the proof of work consensus mechanism to proof of stake. And as expected, this has drastically reduced the network’s energy consumption and environmental impact among several other changes to its tokenomics.
Interestingly though, the new PoS is also kickstarting similarly as the last block of the previous PoW went out. The first block on the proof of stake has also been used to mint an NFT.