Billionaire tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, best known for co-founding the business networking site LinkedIn, is releasing a series of Solana-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on images he created using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence software.
Hoffman announced the initiative on Twitter, saying that the first piece would be auctioned on Magic Eden, the biggest Solana NFT marketplace, starting on July 21st, 2022.
The project is called “Untranslatable Words,” and will consist of eleven pieces of tokenized images that were created using DALL-E 2, which uses AI to generate artwork based on written prompts.
Inspired by the potential of DALL-E 2 and NFTs, the first item in the collection, ‘Mångata’, is up for auction and currently has a top bid of $517. The Swedish word means ‘road-like reflection of the moon on water.’ Hoffman wrote that he was inspired by words that exist in other languages where no single word equivalent in our own language exists and that he wanted to create something unique that could not be found anywhere else.
He plans on splitting the funds generated by each auction between charitable causes as well as his collaborators. Any NFTs that aren’t purchased during the auctions will be burnt or permanently destroyed.
DALL-E 2 images have been spread widely across the internet since the last version of Open AI’s platform was released in April. The software creates various pieces of art based on user-provided texts and can yield surprisingly accurate results — even from combinations of unrelated terms.
Solana Is Having a Busy 2022
Despite the crypto winter, the Solana blockchain, an alternative to Ethereum, has been extremely active so far in 2022. Here are three stories from Rarity Sniper about Solana over the last couple of months.
In June at NFT.NYC, Solana revealed that it was manufacturing a Web3 smartphone that would debut in Q1 of 2023. The phone is called “Saga,” and contains a marketplace for dApps, secure storage of seed phrases, and 512 GB of storage.
Also in June, Solana Labs announced it was making a $100 million investment in South Korea’s Web3, particularly in the metaverse gaming sector. South Korea is perhaps the most bullish country on Web3 and the metaverse, along with the United Arab Emirates.
Lastly, the #1 marketplace for NFTs OpenSea just announced that it would be introducing a Solana launchpad to its platform. The launchpad will enable Solana NFT creators to host NFT mints from start to finish.
Because Solana is a lightning-fast blockchain with extremely cheap transaction fees, it has become a popular alternative to the NFT leader Ethereum. We’ll have to wait and see if it can unseat its rival as the top NFT blockchain, but another creative NFT collection from a well-known billionaire like Hoffman shouldn’t hurt its chances.