The moment when you are reading this piece, Ethereum has successfully achieved the biggest upgrade in its history. The Ethereum blockchain serves as a decentralized and open-source L1 blockchain with smart contract functionality, the bloom of DeFi protocol and NFT have garnered even more supporters in these two years. After months of hard work and dedication, The Merge has finally arrived and the Ethereum community can’t wait any longer for this. To celebrate this important milestone of Ethereum, renowned blockchain companies and artists are launching commemorative NFTs - mostly free - for the community. While most of these NFTs might not have resale value, they may act as a proof-of-witness looking back five or ten years down the road. For now, there are 4 NFT collections handpicked by me after searching for a whole morning. Grab them before it’s too late as some of the collections come in limited quantity and duration!
1. Proof of Stake - https://proofofstake.gitcoin.co/pledge
You may donate any amount of ETH to receive an NFT and digitally signed book from Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. You'll mint a non-transferable NFT and, when the book is available, you'll gain access to your signed digital copy.
For pledges made here, funds will go 90% to the Gitcoin Grants matching pool and 10% to the publishing partner, Seven Stories Press, for supporting public goods in independent publishing. For book copies purchased here or anywhere, Vitalik has committed all of his proceeds to Gitcoin Grants.
2. Proof of Merge - https://www.proofofmerge.xyz/
The crypto team of a16z, a stage-agnostic venture capital firm, has created a non-transferable, free-to-mint, dynamic NFT that outputs different metadata and artwork based on the value of the `DIFFICULTY` (or `PREVRANDAO`) opcode and the estimated time of The Merge.
The NFT features ASCII art – visuals rendered in a computer language for encoding alphanumeric characters – by x0r (an art alias of one of the authors).
You can mint this NFT until the Merge takes place, at which time minting ability will be cut off.
3. Regenesis - https://merge.consensys-nft.com/
To mark the historical moment, the leading Ethereum software company, ConsenSys, is inviting the world to participate in one of the first sustainable NFT drops on the Ethereum Mainnet.
The collection, called Regenesis, comes in different editions including an open edition focused on the most important benefit of the Merge: sustainability. Minting will begin the day of the Merge and be open and available to all. Bear in mind the claim window will remain open only for 72 hours.
4. Ethereum Merge Fractal - https://ethereum-merge-fractals.surge.sh/
To celebrate the Ethereum Merge, software developer David Ryan created a fully on-chain digital generative art NFT collection. The animated SVG images are generated entirely within the smart contract, without using external data sources such as IPFS.
All proceeds of NFT sales (100%) go to the Protocol Guild to support Ethereum core development, with a 0% charge on resale. Minting starts at 0.001 ETH, increasing by 0.0002 ETH every 50 mints, so the total raise is 75 ETH.
At the time of writing, 2967 of the collection’s 5,875 unique pieces had been minted. You may need at least (as the price might go up) 0.0128 ETH + gas fee to mint one of these commemorative NFTs.
Bookmark this page as the list will be updated from time to time, providing there is more commemorative NFT in near future!