Tungsten is one of the heaviest elements: A 4-inch block of the metal, which can easily fit in the palm of your hand, weighs a shocking 41 pounds. Something about picking up a cube feels like it violates the rules of physics, and to show off this property, a company called Midwest Tungsten Service sells them in sizes ranging from 1 centimeter ($19.99) to 4 inches ($2,999.99). Recently, these novelty items have become a hot commodity—driven largely by interest from cryptocurrency enthusiasts. A combination of memes from crypto-influencers, a joke about a supply shortage, and the bizarre speculative energy around collectibles that permeates the crypto-community in general have conspired to generate an incredible surge of orders. Amid this fervor, which began in mid-October, some of Midwest Tungsten’s more popular cube sizes have sold out. One might reasonably wonder: What is going on?
Nic Carter, a partner in the blockchain investment firm Castle Island Ventures, described himself as “Tungsten cube patient zero in the crypto-industry.” He has been buying cubes for about four years, for himself and as gifts for others. Of the recent surge, he said, “It’s classic crypto stuff, taking funny concepts and then massively taking the joke too far.” (He has recently changed his Twitter display name to “nic cubeter.”) Carter likes the cubes in part for their sheer physicality. “I like the atomic properties of Tungsten, the density, the hardness,” he said.
This is one of the main explanations people seem to provide for crypto-enthusiasts’ sudden turn to cubes: maybe they simply want something physical as a counterweight to crypto. “We deal with this immaterial virtual world—the metaverse, as we like to say,” Carter said. “We’re dealing with synthetic commodities, and NFTs, which have financial value, but are completely ethereal. So it’s nice to return to the atoms.” Financiers have long sought physical manifestations of their abstract work; maybe this is a crypto version of the “deal toy” that bankers get for IPOs and mergers. Perhaps there’s some comfort, in the world of financial abstraction, about something heavy you can hold in your hand.
But this something else at work here—a loosely-tied online community that more or less mimics each other’s enthusiasms, whether about particular NFTs or the joy of holding a heavy cube in your hand. “It’s a very close community in the sense that everyone just hangs out on Twitter and Discord a lot,” said Dan Matuszewski, partner at CMS Holdings. “It’s a very large online community that acts together, so things just pick up steam really quickly. It’s a hive mind.”
The unlikely winner of this hive mind’s recent activity has been Midwest Tungsten Service, which is based in Willowbrook, Illinois and describes itself as a company “providing high quality refractory metal”—raw materials including tungsten, tantalum, and molybdenum, in forms like rods, wires, and sheets. Founded in 1958, they make aircraft parts, x-ray shields, and vacuum furnace elements in their factory. The cubes were always a novelty product. They have gone through a few cycles of popularity in the past, said Sean Murray, who works for the company; they saw an increase in sales when someone made a YouTube video of dropping one from a high place, and when someone posted on Quora about them. But Midwest Tungsten Service has never seen anything quite like this. “My colleague got a voicemail when he came in recently, and it was someone saying, ‘Hey, you’re blowing up on crypto twitter, you guys should engage there,’” Murray said. “I’m not a Twitter creator by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve tweeted a handful of times in my life, so I’m not really in the habit of it, but we’re trying our best to be engaged with people who are really excited about Tungsten, and that matches our own excitement about it.” He described his own first experience of holding one of the tiny, bizarrely heavy cubes as “like a magic trick.”
Tungsten cubes remain a relatively small part of the company’s business, so although some sizes are sold out, there’s no immediate danger of a supply shortage. In fact, they’ve been making bigger and bigger cubes for enthusiasts like Dan Matuszewski, who recently ordered a five-inch cube, a six-inch cube and a seven-inch cube, the largest of which will weigh 230 pounds. Murray said he’s been thrilled with the way people are conveying their enthusiasm. “We’ve always thought that getting Tungsten into people’s hands sells it immediately, and people on Twitter, especially in the crypto community, are really good at conveying the sense of wonder and awe that people experience when they hold Tungsten cubes,” he said.
And Midwest Tungsten has decided to embrace the crypto community right back: They have minted an NFT that is currently for sale on OpenSea. The NFT represents a 14-inch Tungsten cube that would weigh 1,784 pounds if they were to manufacture it. Its minimum bid is 47.74 ETH, or about $200,000; Murray said they’ll order the raw materials as soon as someone hits the minimum bid—and whoever owns the NFT will then get annual visiting rights to the cube, which will remain at Midwest Tungsten’s Willowbrook factory, in part because its size would make it difficult for anyone to actually keep in their house. Though if the buyer chooses, they can also “burn” their NFT, basically destroying it digitally, in which case Midwest Tungsten will try to solve the logistical problem of getting the cube to its owner. “We’re going to have a room in our facility that’s only for the Tungsten cube, and we want to design it in a way that’s appropriate for the magnificence of the cube,” Murray said. “
There is all, of course, somewhat absurd. But perhaps the craziest part is that, despite various plausible explanations, none of it really seems to be happening for any reason at all. “There’s no angle to any of it,” Dan Matuszewski said. “No one is really many any money or selling these higher. It’s just fun. I was walking to someone who wanted to know: what’s the angle? If there is one, I don’t know it.”
