A Hamilton man’s 3D art scheme which raked in more than $100 million but delivered “comically bad” results has caused an online storm.
:quality(70):focal(-5x-5:5x5)/cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/tvnz/3RR2QAE35FBUJIZCUKME2STTK4.jpg)
Tucked away in the rumpus room of his parents’ house in the upper middle-class suburb of Rototuna, 20-year-old Martin van Blerk sold the digital investing world a dream – a fantastical universe called Pixelmon.
Pixelmon was pitched as a home for people to buy and collect the digital trading assets known as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
In layman’s terms, non-fungible means it is unique and cannot be replaced, and the buyer owns a unique piece of code as an asset.
Under the internet handle Syber, van Blerk showed off concept art and a short demo of Pixelmon in late 2021. He also promised exclusive access to games and events.
It looked like a top-tier product, investor Sam* said. He thought investing in Pixelmon was a sure thing and he would make a lot of money. Everyone 1News spoke to knew that, like all investments, this was a risk.
“I thought that this project was going to do well, because everyone thought so,” he said
The auction price for these digital assets – 3D model characters – was high by NFT standards. Each NFT was priced at three Ethereum (ETH) – cryptocurrency used for trading NFTs, each one worth roughly $4800.
Van Blerk sold about 7750 Pixelmon NFTs in a Dutch auction, meaning that every 10 minutes the price dropped by 0.1 ETH.
But there was a lot of hype around Pixelmon and they sold out very quickly.
“Everyone was saying ‘yeah, it’s going to sell out’,” Brad*, another investor said. ”And it did. In 10 minutes, they made US$70m.”
The big reveal
It is common in the NFT world to buy before the art is revealed, so when Brad bought his NFT all he saw was a placeholder picture of an egg. Brad had seen van Blerk’s 3D mock-ups and was not worried.
When the egg hatched on February 26, he was “super-excited”. But that soon turned to disappointment.
“It…
