An NFT collection of 10,000 cartoon ducks sold out in less than six hours for $120,000 and saved the designers' home from foreclosure

• An Atlanta couple saved their homestead from foreclosure by selling cartoon duck NFTs.
• The collection of 10,000 ducks sold out in less than six hours for $120,000, CNBC reported.
• Other well-known collections like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club also sold out within hours after launch.

An NFT collection of 10,000 cartoon ducks saved a couple's home from foreclosure.

The collection, dubbed "Dastardly Ducks," sold out in less than six hours for a whopping $120,000, according to a Monday report from CNBC.

The couple behind the NFTs — Thorne Melcher and Mandy Musselwhite — then wrote a check for $40,000 to cover mortgage back-payments and then some, saving their Atlanta homestead where they've raised ducks and geese, among other animals.

"We saved our farm by selling cartoon ducks. It was like a fever dream," Melcher told CNBC's Taylor Locke. The NFT collection's Twitter bio now reads, "All hatched in under 6 hours. You helped save a smol duck farm."

The couple told CNBC that they started the project in early January and launched it in two weeks. As an artist, Musselwhite created the ducks, which have 100 different traits. And Melcher, a coder, learned the Solidity programming language to mint the NFTs on the ethereum blockchain. A friend lent them the money to cover the fee for the NFT collection.

On the website, the couple touted the benefits of ducks for agriculture and said with their NFT collection they wanted to bring the ducks they raise in real life "to the metaverse."

NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens, are unique digital pieces of art tied to blockchain technology. The market for NFTs has exploded in the last year, and in 2021 reached $41 billion in sales, according to one estimate. Enthusiasts have said the digital tokens are the key to unlocking a virtual world called the metaverse in which people interact, play, and work as digital avatars of themselves.

Other NFT collections also reportedly sold out in minutes to hours after launching. For example, the famous CryptoPunks, one of the original NFT collections, sold out in 24 hours after initially going unnoticed. The Bored Ape Yacht Club collection sold in 12 hours, according to CNET. And recently, a collection of 10,000 Wall Street bulls sold out in 32 minutes.

Digital collectible sales have remained strong in the new year. In the last week alone, sales of NFTs were about a quarter of a million dollars, with Decentraland and Bored Ape Yacht Club topping the list, according to nonfungible.com.