Pak is a digital artist or collective of artists formerly known as Murat Pak, who made headlines in late 2021 with the success of a project called The Merge. That was a collection of more than 300,000 NFTs which sold to nearly 30,000 buyers for a grand total of just over $91 million.
The Merge was offered in an open edition rather than a limited or numbered edition; the price was set at the start of the sale at just over $500 with price increases over a fixed period of time. It was an innovation that turned heads.
And it also broke a record or two. Before The Merge, the most expensive digital art was sold by Beeple, titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days. That sold for just over $69 million in an online auction held by Christie’s.
The Merge smashed that record. But was it the best Pak had to offer?
Fomoverse By Pak
Fomoverse consists of just over 1,200 NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. The NFTs themselves are digital artworks with a very simple black and white geometric design. No cats, punks, apes, or penguins here.
Some describe this as a metaverse project, and there seems to be an emphasis on artificial scarcity as a key feature of this project. Go to the Fomoverse page on OpenSea.io and the profile has a tagline that reads “You missed again”.
Whether or not that is a reference to the ancient 1981 hit by Phil Collins (“I Missed Again”) or not remains to be seen.
What’s not so hard to parse is that scarcity seems to be the name of the game. In fact, the further down this particular NFT rabbit hole you go, the more the project seems to be a direct statement about the practice of creating artificial scarcity, FOMO, and related issues.
The Start Of Fomoverse?
On October 3, 2021 via Twitter, NFT enthusiasts and Pak Twitter followers were treated to this tantalizing Tweet which begins with a URL pointing to fomoverse.gg.
The Tweet itself reads, “So, what’s the deal? It was a Fomoverse Parcel that was free to claim. You pay with FOMO in this case. All Parcel Holders are now my partners. It’s yours to keep or sell. I get half of what you earn. Bon appétit.”
Fairly cryptic, to say the least. At least until you click on the link above, which takes you to what is presumably an official site created by Pak which displays the following text. Yes, it’s displayed there in all caps:
“FOMOVERSE FIFTY PERCENT PARTNER PARCEL FREE CLAIM NO PROMISES NO ROADMAP NO UTILITY FOMO GUARANTEED TOKEN CLAIM STARTS YESTERDAY GET YOUR PARCEL OR MISS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY YOU MISSED EVERYTHING ANYWAY SO NO BIGGIE ONLY ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED THIRTY FOUR PARCELS AVAILABLE MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SOME ASH IN YOUR WALLET AND CLAIM YOUR PARTNER PARCEL FOR FREE HERE IF YOU CAN”
The line “Claim your partner parcel for free here if you can” is a link to another page which lets you know “you missed again” with a notification, “Sold out but you missed everything anyway”.
Was this all some kind of crypto vaporware? A look at the Fomoverse page on LuckyTrader includes a mention in the profile that the 1200-plus NFTs associated with this project “sold out in nearly two minutes”.
It’s possible the project really did go up for sale, you may hear some argue, and it really did sell out in 120 seconds. Others may argue that all this is just the hype for a sophisticated art project featuring a deep commentary on the world of NFT projects in general.
One aspect of this project that might lend some respectability to that take on the project that we haven’t discussed yet? One source reports that the idea of Fomoverse “selling out in two minutes” is a bit disingenuous — NFTNow.com reports that all 1,200-plus Fomoverse NFTs were actually provided for free.
Buying Fomoverse
Fomoverse NFTs are available on the secondary market in places such as OpenSea.io. At press time, more than 780 people owned Fomoverse NFTs with a “floor” price of 1 ETH.
Joe Wallace has covered real estate and financial topics, including crypto and NFTs since 1995. His work has appeared on Veteran.com, The Pentagon Channel, ABC and many print and online publications. Joe is a 13-year veteran of the United States Air Force and a former reporter for Air Force Television News.
