Artvatars is a new collaborative art project on Polygon (Matic), a second-layer of the Ethereum blockchain.
Dozens of artists worked together on different characters, and an artificial intelligence mixes the creations together once they are bought by collectors.

The project launched on April 14th, and I came to know about it by chance on Criptoarte Italia. Since it looked like a hot topic, I headed over to the site, where I took a look at the list of artists https://artvatars.com/artists and noticed that Hackatao were among them.

As I also said via chat, I abandoned all forms of professional behavior, which, at the very least, should have led me to read the fundamentals of a project, and moved on to the purchase.

I’m leaving out the… let’s call them “technical” details relating to the purchase methods, which require a few more steps than standard platforms due to the “transit” from Polygon (Matic). Nothing extreme after all, two more clicks and that’s it.

As soon as I got hold of the NFT, I was left baffled because this was the image I had in front of me:

So I got home from the office, but nothing had changed.

Nadia from Hackatao, who asked me via chat if I liked my Artavastar and to whom I replied that it was a nice gray 😀, explained to me that it would take shape and color over time.

And just like that, the next day, this splendid image was born:

The result of this project is a collection of 20,000 unique Artvatars, made up of different elements designed by famous digital art creators.

From a price point of view, this table clearly explains the ratio that was employed.
For example, since mine has the number 5024, I paid 0.30 Ether for it.

Each Artvatar is made up of 12 components. When collectors purchase an Artvatar, these algorithms randomly assign the different components. As a result, the buyer does not know what kind of design they will receive. The eyes could be drawn by Hackatao, the hair by Francesco Mai and the background by Mark Constantine Inducil.
In total, sixty artists worked on the project.

Once all 20,000 Artvatars have been sold, the works of art will only be available on the secondary market on OpenSea.

But I still wanted to satisfy my curiosity, so I contacted MantaXR, the man behind the idea of this project, and asked him four simple questions, to which he kindly and promptly answered.

How long have you been interested in blockchain in general and NFT in particular?
Blockchain since 2013, NFTs since 2018/2019

How did the idea of the Artvastar project come about?
I am collector of Cryptoart since a few years and have very good relationships to a lot of artists and I got this idea and contacted the artists and and they liked it, which is how the project came about.

How were the artists selected?
From most of the artists I own artwork myself, so I contacted them first and then looked to see what other artists could match it from their style.

A prediction: Is Artvastar going to be the Cryptopunks of 2022?
We are currently still flying under the radar because we are launching on layer 2 and it is a bit more difficult for non-savvy users to buy artvatars, soon the marketplace Opensea will have full layer 2 support and then we will gain significant reach. I am sure that this project will bring a lot of joy to many people.

We will continue to follow this interesting project, and with it the advice in the FAQ section of the site, where to the question “Can I sell my Artvatar?”, the answer is affirmative, but the advice is to HODL.

And I will follow it without any hesitation