Midwest Tungsten Service has seen its sales skyrocket in the past. This small industry outside of Chicago saw interest in its products skyrocket every time a science blog or YouTube video featured one of its metal cubes or spinners.
But the eruption of orders he experienced in October was nothing like what he had seen so far.
“On the third day I said, ‘Oh, wow. “This is something completely different,” MTS e-commerce director Sean Murray told Business Insider.
MTS came into the spotlight after a few tweets went viral, making its products the new craze in the crypto community.
This is because MTS mainly sells tungsten cubes, in various sizes. Tungsten is a high density metal, comparable to gold and used in various industrial applications. Even a small piece of this metal is strangely heavy, as a 1.5-inch (3.8 cm) cube weighs a pound and sells for $ 199.
If one prefers a 3-inch (7.6 cm) cube that weighs 8 kg, one would have to pay $ 1,599.
On October 13, sales of the cubes increased by 300%. Very soon, Coindesk, Bloomberg, Vice and the Wall Street Journal wrote about these tungsten cubes.
And MTS saw the stocks that it thought would be enough for several years run out.
But what do those who buy them make these cubes? Absolutely nothing. Nick Carter, a venture capitalist and longtime collector of cubes, told the Wall Street Journal that the density of this object offers a satisfying feel that is in stark contrast to the intangible nature of digital currencies.
“Of course we do not have totems in this activity that we love,” he says, referring to cryptocurrency trading, which is done exclusively online. “And so tungsten fills this void in our hearts.”
In fact, unlike all other collectors who have been interested in tungsten in the past, buyers from the crypto community focus more on the larger cubes.
“We thought no one would buy the 7.6 cm cube. “We did so much, so wrong,” the company says as it launches an even bigger cube in its Amazon store. At 10cm, it weighs almost 19kg and costs $ 3,499.
To anticipate all orders, MTS employees started arriving at work hours earlier than their regular hours, while some brought their wives or children with them to help at times.
In fact, MTS began accepting bitcoin payments on its website, announcing that it would auction an NFT for the largest tungsten cube ever. At almost 37 cm in size, it weighs 907 kg.
Of course, such an object is very expensive to transport, so the cube will remain at the MTS facility, where the new owner will be able to schedule a visit a year, to touch it and photograph it.
The winner of the auction was a crypto group called TungstenDAO, which paid almost 57 ETH (worth $ 247,000 that day) to acquire it.
moneyreview
.
