Switzerland’s national post office has become the second in the world to NFT mailing stamps on the ethereum blockchain.
“At first glance, the Swiss Crypto Stamp looks like any ordinary stamp. It is self-adhesive, shows the Matterhorn and the moon on a blue background, and has a face value of 8.90 francs. Owners can use it to frank postal items just like any other stamp. But the actual crypto stamp is digital and it is a digital collector’s item,” they say.
This sold out with the buyers not knowing what NFT they get until they open the blockchain with most likley to get the common nft of 65,000 items, but one version has only 50 out of 175,000.
Interestingly they use the ERC1155 standard where “each token ID (token type) can contain any number of tokens.”
Thus rather than each jpeg having a unique id even though the jpeg looks the same, there is just one id for the jpeg but numerous copies of it. So a tokenized NFT basically where the unique id has the equivalent of x ERC20 tokens.
Thus we only see 13 items on Opensea, but when you click through you can see how many owners they have, or how many copies there are.
The rarest nft stamps are pictured above on the bottom right of the featured image, but not the most rare, the dragon which has only 50 copies. An offer of 0.3 eth is on the table for it, worth $1,400. Making it a 140x for whoever paid that tenner.
It comes with a whole story. “Many myths and legends surround Mount Pilatus. For example, it is said that in the summer of 1421, a huge dragon flying to Mount Pilatus crashed to the ground so close to a farmer named Stämpflin that it caused him to faint.
When the farmer came to, he found a lump of clotted blood and a stone. This Dragon Stone, which was legally declared as having healing powers in 1509, can now be viewed in Lucerne’s Natural History Museum.”
And they laugh about save as jpegs. Back then you could sell a useless stone as some mighty healing dragon. Nothing compared to some lake sword that gives kingship rights though.
Austria was the first to nft their stamps in 2019, a more primitive time as we couldn’t see their nfts back then. Now their rarest ones, the reds and yellow, are going for 5 eth, more than $20,000.
The Austrian stamps came with eth inside, so you could use it as a wallet of sorts. They also sold out quickly, with these being simple nfts. Copy or not, each has their own unique token, 178,100 of them.
They told us back then 150,000 were issued. You can’t lie on the blockchain, so we’d take the blockchain’s facts over anyone else’s. Not that we’d in any way impugn such a thing on Austria. They’ve clearly issued new stamps, them lamas or pandas with the unicorn ones being the 2019 ones.
Five eth for a jpeg. Yet here for some reason it feels more real. It’s an old institution upgrading an old tradition. Afterall the physical stamps are just a paper jpeg too. Five eth for a piece of paper, no one says because we were born into a world where such a thing just happened.
More than the value therefore, is the statement. How did you win grandpa? Well, dadadadada… and they came out of the woodworks, you know, we had support and even encouragement. Like the Austrian post office and the Swiss post office issued some digital stamps, some nfts. Small thing, but back then it said to us: we’re with you, we’re with the new world, we’re coming wherever you’re goin.
That’s what makes it historical. Not the paper and not the jpeg, but that story it tells about how transition happens. That indisputable fact, and what else is more valuable than the ability to establish indisputable facts, whether in jpeg or in paper or in whatever other form as long as the substance remains that of an indisputable fact.
