We realized that it is straight forward to create a marketplace using the AtomicMarket contract and that it shouldn’t be that hard to create an interface that can handle NFT auctions. At that point of time there was simply no interface that was able to do this, so we decided to build it.

Initially we planned to create our own special NFT for the first ever auction on Proton. During that time I was quite active in various NFT channels on Telegram and in discussion with some creators. When 0xCypherpunk showed me the Power of Soon Cypherpunk he created it was clear to me and my team:

This will be the first NFT that we will auction on our interface!

It turned out that it became a race between Protonmint and us to launch the very first NFT auction on Proton. As we didn’t want to rush the launch of the auction and preferred to test it first on testnet we lost this race unfortunately. Protonmint managed to launch the first NFT auction on Proton accepting XUSDC and we were happy to see what’s possible and even identified a bigger opportunity:

The launch of the first NFT auction accepting XPR as means of payment — which was our initial plan anyway ;-)

On 10 October 2021we announced the first ever NFT auction to accept XPR as means of payment with a starting bid of 1 XPR.

The auction was set to run for ~1 week and we got a lot of attention to it. We were happy that some of the biggest names in the ecosystem participated in this auction. Even Marshall tested the interface and placed a bid of 1000 XPR on day 1 of the auction.

As Protonians love to stake their XPR it was certainly a hard decision for everybody to unstake their tokens. There is a freeze time of 24 hours before users can access their funds after unstaking. As initiator of an auction accepting XPR you should be aware of that if you expect huge demand and a high price!

After launching the auction I discussed with 0xCypherpunk how we can motivate more people to participate in the auction and we decided to reward every participant with an airdrop of another special NFT dedicated to the power of soon, the #PowerOfSoon Visionary:

In total we had 28 unique auction participants. As I personally also placed a bid to test the live auction system myself, we decided to exclude my account from the airdrop. This means that this NFT was distributed to all other 27 auction participants exclusively.

In the end the #PowerOfSoon Cypherpunk special edition sold for incredible 259400.0000 XPR to Tobias Cabrera Cano which was ~10k USD at that point of time.

We were pretty confident that there will be demand for this historic auction, but we never expected such a huge success. We want to thank everybody involved in this historic moment in the young history of Proton, especially 0xCypherpunk who provided us those awesome NFTs!

Power of Soon now aims to make NFT auctions on Proton even more accessible and user friendly. We will take our time to build soon.market and make sure that everybody will love hosting and participating in NFT auctions on Proton!

Historical conversation with 0xCypherpunk

For everybody interested I provided some parts of the historical conversation between 0xCypherpunk and me, have fun reading! :-)