Fortune Teams Up with Famed Digital Artist Shells for NFT Drop of Iconic Magazine Cover

The unlimited sale will last for 24 hours beginning April 9 on Foundation

NEW YORK, April 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Fortune announced the details of its second NFT drop, which will take place on April 9, 2023, and allow collectors to bid on an iconic magazine cover by the trailblazing generative artist and creative coder Itzel Yard, also known as Ix Shells. The piece, titled Fortune: Crypto Climbs Back From The Worst Year Ever, will be available for 0.1 ETH during the 24 hour sale.

The unlimited sale will go live on Sunday, April 9, at 1:00 pm EDT on Foundation, a platform building no-code tools for the web3 creator community. The release will be an editioned ERC-721 NFT in collaboration with Yard and generative art agency ARTXCODE. The NFT will contain an animated version of the historic cover, which you can see here and will be distributed as a limited edition for the April/May 2023 U.S. of the magazine and the sole cover of the Europe and Asia editions, all of which will be available on newsstands beginning April 25, 2023.

Yard's Fortune debut follows the groundbreaking release of popular NFT artist pplpleasr's whimsical Fortune cover art in August of 2021, which coincided with the peak of the last crypto boom and came as a celebration of the crypto industry. The new cover by Yard reflects different themes—ones of building and resilience—and is being sold at an accessible price point (around $170) to allow for the broadest possible section of the crypto community to participate and express support for the industry as it emerges from one of its darkest times.

Yard's piece represents hope for the world of crypto, where her artistic practice has found its home. This is reflected in the seemingly magical growth of pixels in her artwork. The shifting of the building blocks in Fortune: Crypto Climbs Back From The Worst Year Ever move up and down, and in a steady clockwise motion. This continuity, despite the ups and downs, mirrors the strides that have been made in the crypto ecosystem over the last year. Created in Touch Designer, a node-based visual programming language for real time, interactive, multimedia content, Yard's artwork was created with a 3D displacement program, a noise algorithm, and geometries. 

"The algorithm I used to make the artwork is something that expands pixels and can convert a small black square into a more extensive geometric shape," said Yard. "For me it looks like when I'm walking in the middle of a city and I look up and see all the buildings."

The 32-year-old Panamanian artist also used the cover project to express her view of crypto and NFTs as a long-term mission, and to celebrate those who have been building through good times and bad.

"Me and the community I surround myself with are the ones that are building instead of just looking for a way to get rich quick or to get famous. I'd like to demonstrate that, although it was a hard year for everyone in crypto economically, a lot of things are evolving very quickly like with AI, ChatGPT, and other tools that one way or another are connected with the NFT and blockchain revolution. I want people to see that growth, instead of becoming collectively mired in negative thoughts."

Fortune has been on the forefront of reporting on business and finance trends and technologies since its launch in 1930 and is one of the earliest mainstream outlets to dedicate regular space to cryptocurrency with its 2017 launch of The Ledger franchise. Under Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell's leadership, Fortune has greatly expanded the scope of its coverage of web3 and A.I. It featured an exclusive look at Katie Haun's historic $1.5 billion crypto fund launch, the rapid rise of elusive Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, questioned whether Sam Bankman-Fried would crash and burn, and explored why OpenAI founder Sam Altman says the A.I. future could be spectacular—unless it goes spectacularly wrong—on cover stories of Fortune magazine. Last year, Fortune also launched Fortune Crypto under Crypto Editor Jeff John Roberts, author of the book Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street.

Yard is a self-taught creative coder and artist based in Panama with a background in Architectural Technology and Computer Science. She has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary generative art. In 2021, her breakout work, "Dreaming at Dusk," a collaboration with the Tor Project, which also sold on Foundation, sold for 500 ETH—over 2 million dollars at the time of sale. That same year, Fortune named Yard to the Fortune NFTy 50, a ranking of the most influential builders, creatives, and influencers on the NFT scene.

This collaboration marks a partnership between a pillar of the crypto-native community and a legacy global media outlet. This is Fortune's second release in the web3 space, following a limited release with the artist pplpleasr in 2021 that won an EPPY award for Best Innovation Project on a Website. Half of the proceeds of that sale, approximately $660,000 when the contribution was made, were donated to four journalistic nonprofit organizations via the Fortune Journalism PleasrFund, a decentralized donor-advised fund run entirely on the Ethereum blockchain through Endaoment. Fortune's continued active participation in the world of web3 reflects its commitment to covering the crypto economy and acknowledging its continued importance in the conversation about business.  

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SOURCE FORTUNE Media