Hannah Grace Tech 12.02.2021 04:Dec AM EST

'Star Trek' NFT Has Living Bacteria Cell: Is It for Sale?

The new "Star Trek" NFT is considered to be the first living NFT, and it will be displayed at the Art Basel Miami Beach art market starting December 2.

Despite being an artwork, it will not be sold on most energy-intensive blockchains .

'Star Trek' NFT

"Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry's signature on the original contract for his creation with Lucille Ball's Desilu Productions is now an NFT, per The Verge.

This is being labeled as the first "Living Eco-NFT" by Roddenberry Entertainment, which sounds like something out of science fiction.

The "Star Trek" NFT developers used DNA coding to implant the signature, which was signed in 1965, into a living bacterium cell. As the cell multiplies, new copies of the NFT are created over a billion in one night.

Moreover, the NFT is known as "El Primero," which means "first" in Spanish, despite the fact that billions of duplicates might be made shortly.

However, the bacterium cells are currently inactive.

These inactive bacterium cells can be resurrected in the future, and from there, it can start multiplying again.

In relation to this, scientists freeze-dried the cells. It is then displayed at the Art Basel Miami Beach art market. The said "Star Trek" display is placed into a glass cube-encased vial.

For those people who are curious to know about what DNA coding is, Britannica stated that it is the arrangement of nucleotides in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) that defines the building blocks of proteins.

On the other hand, The Verge added that the nucleotides adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine - A, T, C, and G for short - are the basic building blocks for DNA, rather than the zeros and ones used by computers.

Different combinations of those nucleotides function as genetic codes for characteristics such as hair and eye color. With that being stated, this code could also be used to preserve digital information, including on an NFT.

Is the 'Star Trek' NFT For Sale?

The Eco-NFT is a first in many aspects, according to Roddenberry Entertainment and biotech inventors Agustin Fernandez and Dr. Paul Predki, per Movie Web.

Aside from being the first living NFT, it is the first eco-NFT as well. In addition to this, it was not only manufactured and stored on organic material, but it also promised to be carbon-neutral, if not carbon-negative.

However, it is worth noting that the "Star Trek" NFT will not be traded nor bought on the most energy-intensive blockchains.

Solana Labs and Metaplex Studios have worked on the project, which is developed on the Solana blockchain.

To give detailed information about Solana Labs, it is a blockchain that employs a "Proof of Stake" method that requires substantially less energy than Ethereum, which is the blockchain that most NFTS is based on.

"Proof of Stake nixes puzzles, instead of requiring users to lock up some of their existing tokens as a security measure to "prove" they have a "stake" in keeping the ledger accurate," The Verge explained.

Eliminating those puzzles reduces energy use and emissions significantly.

On the other hand, a single Ethereum transaction consumes almost as much power as a typical US home consumes in 6.81 days, per Digiconomist. Meanwhile, Solana labs estimated that it is roughly equal to two Google searches.

Moreover, Solana's head of communications Austin Federa stated that minting one NFT requires approximately the same amount of energy as eight Google searches.