The legendary Italian bike brand Colnago has launched a new bike... but not as you know it. The C64 NFT isn't actually a physical bicycle, but instead a non-fungible token (NFT) stored on a blockchain. The digital asset is up for auction, with a starting price of almost £5,000.
> Review: Colnago C64 frameset
Confused? Essentially an NFT is a form of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, but it takes the form of a digital item instead of money. Notable things that have already been sold as NFTs include Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet on the platform, Wayne Rooney's 2011 overhead goal against Manchester City and Mike Winkelmann's digital artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, that fetched a whopping $69 million at a Christie's auction.
Colnago (to our knowledge) is the first bike brand to get in on the act, claiming that the C64 NFT "combines all 67 years of historic Colnago moments into a unique NTF bike."
If it was real the bike would certainly be an intriguing mishmash, fusing together:
- The Bititan bike that Abraham Olano won the World Championships on in 1995
- Anthony Charteau's Polka Dot jersey-winning C59 from the 2010 Tour de France
- The C35 TTT that won the Team Time Trial World Championship 100km in 1994
- Giuseppe Saronni's Super Profil
- Tony Rominger's Hour Record bike
- Tadej Pogačar's Tour de France-winning V3Rs
- The C40 icon of Team Mapei.
Colnago boasts that the "incredible" NFT is "becoming part of Colnago history and will never be duplicated."
Reaction to the auction so far has included surprise, bemusement and some backlash, with some citing the irony of an emission-beating bike being made available as an NFT, when the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency often used to buy one has received much criticism. The Verge cites a study by the digital artist Memo Akten (which is no longer available to view online due to "abuse and harassment" according to Akten himself) that analysed the environmental impact of 18,000 NFTs. Akten discovered that the average NFT had a carbon footprint equivalent to a month's worth of household electricity, and could be as high as two month's worth.
Still interested? Bidding has already opened on OpenSea here and will close on 25th May, with the reserve price of $6,674.89 at the time of writing (about £4,796) yet to be matched. And no, we don't know how much it weighs...
Indeed, I have noticed that as my hands are not frozen I am able to use the brakes properly....
Plenty drinkable single malts for that price
The problem with this sort of driving is that half the drivers will be pissed off, the other half will be thinking "Why didn't I think of that?"...
Luxury! You can almost fit a 3" tyre past your toes there! In Edinburgh I'd want steelies doing that.
Since we're on 1678 comments, I assumed it was a case of "Cap'n, she cannae take any more", but Lo! here we are without having to select newest...
Never used electrical tape, but thorns were a right pain growing up in Oz and we used to make little loose wire straddles to sit next to the brake...
They don't seem to have learned from the failings of the review of the Halfords Intercity - they don't tell you the actual tyre size: 20x1.75 is...
Most things in cycling go in cycles. I've got a poster of bikes from over 100 years ago - custom frame bags, dropped stays, passive suspension all...
Now I wish I had Shimano disks just so I could upgrade to them. Well found. Unfortunately my Hope's don't have this design error.
a phenomenON.