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The NFT market has been quieter lately, but that doesn't mean interesting work has stopped being made.
Here are three upcoming mints I'm keeping an eye on this month.
1) Inaccessible Worlds
- sgt_slaughtermelon is one of my favorite creators. I was a big fan of his I Am Not Good at Computer drop, which debuted on Base in 2024 and showed a deep conceptual approach to digital art.
- That said, right now I'm excited about a new release he and his collaborators DUSKO and Doug Pfeffer have coming next week, Inaccessible Worlds: Unlockable Modes.
- Based around corrupted video game aesthetics, the surreal collection explores "un-designed virtual spaces." Within are 17 distinct visual styles, or Modes, that can be minted from, and you can unlock different modes depending on your onchain collecting history.
- For instance, Jonathan "Song a Day" Mann's NFT collectors can unlock the Troparion mode, and so on and so forth. Multiple modes have already been previewed, like Antipode, Avila, Mew, and Virgil.
- Your past participation in digital art opens new worlds in this collection accordingly. It’s a thoughtful push toward deeper onchain memory, which I love.
- As for mint details, the drop will take place on Base and will be open for ~2 weeks. I haven't seen a specific date or a minting price announced yet, but the cost won't be high. If you're looking for something unique to rekindle your onchain collection, this will be a charming starting point.
2) To Be a Machine
- A similarly tasteful upcoming release I'm looking forward to is To Be a Machine by ripe, another renowned artist in the
Ethereum community. For now, the collection's launch date is yet to be announced, but expect it sometime in the next week. - With this series, the idea is that each token you mint will be a living machine, generating new frames every Ethereum block. Your NFTs won't stop changing until you opt to settle on one frame, locking it permanently onchain.
- To me, the best cryptoart is art that approaches the blockchain as an interactive medium, which is what we have here. TBAM NFTs will have fixed DNA for possible hues (1-8 colors), then the compositions reconfigure endlessly as new blocks arrive, and then collectors decide when to finalize the forms.
- Minting will start with an initial 24-hour window at 0.0042 ETH. Afterwards, when someone settles a frame, two things happen: a 69-minute minting window for new tokens kicks off, as does a 24-hour open edition mint for that settled frame. The base minting price will also rise incrementally with each settlement.
- I'm barely doing the collection's intricacies justice here, but if you dive into the details you'll see like I saw that this certainly isn't your run of the mill NFT drop. It's poised to be ripe's finest work to date, so keep the release on your radar.
3) NORMIES
- While the projects mentioned above were intensively developed over months, AI is paving the way for creators to release compelling collections without tons of manual coding. One example of this? The upcoming NORMIES project by serc.
- Simply put, serc created an algorithm that uses AI to generate portrait images and then converts those images into 40x40 pixel art. Since the pieces are rendered as SVGs, they will be very small in size and will be stored fully onchain on Ethereum.
- The end result will be a 20k PFP collection where each NFT is a distinct 1/1 work, since all the traits therein will be generated as unique outputs.
- Speed and experimentation produce their own kind of vitality, and the vibe coding approach behind NORMIES is just the latest demonstration that AI is making it so that ideas will the main bottleneck for creatives going forward, not technical ability.
- The mint data and mint price haven't been announced yet, but I'm expecting it will officially launch soon and the cost will be affordable. Keep your eyes peeled for more details in the coming days!
