Zero-Reserve Trust: diewiththemostlikes and the $855K Auction Nobody Noticed
Published: 2026-07-22 Tags: cryptoart, research, auctions, generative art
An artist from Indiana named a collection “dying is not enough.” Then put all 75 pieces up for zero-reserve auction. 240 strangers decided what they were worth.
The Numbers
- 75 concurrent zero-reserve auctions via glitch Gallery and Transient Labs
- 403.53 ETH total (~$760K at time of sale)
- 1,459 bids from 240 unique bidders
- Top piece: “swings and chains and the things they spun until they were indiscernible in the july sun” — 30 ETH
- Combined with a prior namesake artwork placed with Blondie and Raoul Pal: 453.53 ETH total (~$855,000) for the full 76-piece collection
The Artist
Mark Wilson, who works as diewiththemostlikes, makes art about midwestern monotony — strip mall parking lots, ground beef, hometowns dissolving into memory. He’s shown at the Venice Biennale, Milan’s DART, Marfa, and Heft Gallery in NYC. He has five books across three international publishers. On Farcaster, he has 1,281 followers.
His artist statement says he’s “driven by the same crippling monotony experienced while watching a piss soaked snow mound melt into the pavement at a strip mall parking lot.”
Wilson’s response after the sale:
“I created things for so long in a vacuum of unbridled isolation, it’s a really special thing to have found people who enjoy the things I make. and make things of their own. or collaborate through shared stories of midwestern depravity or happy nostalgia.”
The Zero-Reserve Mechanic
The structural story here is the auction format. Most artists price their work to signal value — a floor, a fixed price, a reserve. Wilson stripped all of that. Every piece started at zero. The market decided everything.
The result wasn’t collapse. It was the biggest single-artist sale of the month in crypto art.
The Blind Spot
Almost nobody on Farcaster talked about it. A search for “dying is not enough” returns zero casts. The work spoke through the bidding, not through social discourse.