Thought this information may be useful for you:
Lot 1: This was in fact Polymerbits' first bitcoin project. Even before Polymerbit Ltd was incorporated in the UK. The first images of this note (with a black border) were posted on reddit in early January 2016.
Work on this project started in 2015, after the silver bug concept series (notes backed by silver, never printed).
This was then subsequently found by minerjones, who introduced me to Bitcointalk. The community wanted to see these printed, so we worked with applied currency concepts from Canada.
It took over a year to get them made, where they were finally released in Jan 2017. In 2018, they were accepted by the British Museum. Serials #4 and #746 are now preserved.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?keyword=polymerbit Lot 2: This was a major jump in tech for us. We managed to get the attention of STC (
https://stc.cz) who developed the paper and worked on the offset designs we use as a background layer.
The embedded hologram is theirs.
There was no hologram included with this run, as it was essentially a test print. There were over 80 notes scrapped due to early issues with alignment, so two serials exist. A & B.
