Chain Runners is a group of "Ten Thousand" pixelated renegades Non Fungible Tokens living on the Ethereum blockchain. Each Runner is created at random, with 13 layers, 8 colors per layer, and alpha blending^[1].

Overview

10,000 32x32-pixel Chain Runners are available, and their costs are currently skyrocketing. The going rate appears to be around three ETH, or roughly $12,500, though there is a lot of variation across the collection, as with any NFT^[2].

The entire atmosphere is "Blade Runner" meets Sega Genesis, and the project has a detailed background that incorporates a Mega-City home base and a squad of renegades known as "The Runners" fighting against authority^[3].

This collection advances the concept of NFTs as a whole. For starters, they're decentralized and on-chain, unlike many other initiatives that appear Web3-ish but are nonetheless structured as Web 2.0^[4].

"A project like Chain Runners is a fantastic experiment in IP development with a community," Greylock's Sarah Guo wrote, "and is captivating the interest of crypto and tech leaders as well as first-time NFT customers alike."  Chain Runners was created by a few of the developers behind Blitmap, another super-ambitious NFT project that exists in an entire sci-fi universe^[5].

The Chain Runner Collection

The collection has a total of 10,000 NFTs, all of which were minted at a cost of 0.05 ETH each. They're still available at OpenSea. The collection is presently owned by 3043 people. The collection's overall sales volume has surpassed $1 million^[6].

A single NFT cost around $4.5k on average. The most expensive NFT piece in the collection was Runner #9527, which sold for $588.1k. The NFT collection also features a fantastic history, which includes a Mega City and a band of outlaws known as The Runners. These Runners are taking on the authorities.

With being totally on-chain and decentralized, the collection has managed to push the concept of NFTs in a new direction. The developers release the NFTs under a permissive license because the entire code is open source. The tech community has had a thrilling time as a result of this.

Team & Investors

The big tech names to buy Runners over the last few days: Josh Buckley, the investor, and former Product Hunt C.E.O, who appears to own 135 Runners; Away founder Jen Rubio; Nothing's Carl Pei; 20VC's Harry Stebbings; Worklife's Bri Kimmel; Figma's Dylan Field; Gary Vaynerchuk; and Alex Pall, of The Chainsmokers, who absolutely counts as a tech mogul^[7].

Treading [Chain-Runners]

Chain Runners seem to be the next big thing in NFTs. It's a relatively new project, but it took off in a big way over the last few days, and looks headed to join Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Cryptopunks on NFT Mount Rushmore^[8].

There's also some speculation that Coinbase's Brian Armstrong may have bought a Runner, which supporters are very excited about but is so far hard to know for sure.

10,000 32x32-pixel Chain Runners are available, and their costs are currently skyrocketing. The going rate appears to be around 3 ETH, or roughly $12,500, though there is a lot of variation across the collection, as with any NFT.

The Chain Runners collection is advancing the concept of NFTs as a whole. For starters, they're decentralized and on-chain, unlike many other initiatives that appear Web3-ish but are nonetheless structured as Web 2.0.