Art Blocks NFT platform winds down Curated Series, plans branding refresh

The Art Blocks NFT creation platform is winding down its Curated Series, with Series 8 set to be the final Curated Series project.

Over the last two years, some 60,000 Curated projects have been released as part of Art Blocks’ numbered sets, which the company described as “a member of a closed family of projects.”

“Each series number also told a story of art, in its evolution and boundary pushing. Many felt, as we do, that every Curated artist represented in a set, was at a moment of intense and beautiful creativity,” it said in a Medium post yesterday.

Speaking with NFT Culture, Art Blocks founder Eric Calderon said that the company is also working on upgrades to its platform, including an updated Curatorial Board, and a branding refresh.

“Art Blocks is headed towards a more refined experience, the fruits of the last few months of heads down work that the incredible team has been doing towards what we’ve basically coined Art Blocks 2.0,” he said.

Launched in 2020, Art Blocks is an NFT creation platform based on Ethereum which specialises in generative art. It has three types of projects, Curated, Playground and Factory, with the former open only to artists accepted by the team. On OpenSea, Art Blocks Curated ranks fifth by all-time volume, having made 73,000 sales since launch.

Some of its collections are among the most expensive on the market. Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs, a 999-strong collection of “structured curves,” currently has a floor price of 96 ETH ($133,000) — although people have paid much more. In October 2021, the rapper Snoop Dogg paid a staggering 2,500ETH ($8.5m at the time) for Fidenza 938.

Bankrupt cryptocurrency investment firm Three Arrows Capital also held several Art Blocks NFTs in its collection. Among them, it paid 1,800ETH ($5.8 million at the time) for a Ringers NFT created by artist Dmitri Cherniak in August 2021.