Artist Mike Winklemann sold his EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS collection under the pseudonym Beeple. He did this in the form of $ 69.3 million NFT tokens at Christie’s.
Thus, this transaction became the third among the most expensive transactions in art in history. The final bid of the auction reached $ 60.3 million , but taking into account all commissions, the collection cost an anonymous buyer $ 69.3 million . And this is a huge achievement for digital art that is just gaining traction.
By tradition, let’s start with an explanation. NFT tokens are one of the main trends in the cryptocurrency industry in early 2021. In essence, they are digital ownership of a specific item, which is at the same time enshrined in an immutable blockchain.
That is, a person can buy a unique work and be sure that no one will fake or steal it. This attracts collectors who receive protection from fraudsters and universal proof of their ownership of a particular object.
Creating an NFT token is not as difficult as it sounds. For this – in addition to the work itself – you need to have an Ethereum wallet and a certain amount of ETH on it. We discussed the topic of unique tokens in detail in a separate article. It includes instructions on how to create an NFT and sell your own tweets, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey recently did.
Examples of selling NFT works
EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS is a collective piece that illuminates the artist’s journey of making art over the past thirteen years. It is an amalgamation of thousands of paintings by the artist under the pseudonym Beeple throughout his entire career. Recall that Beeple is the most famous crypto artist who, until recently, was able to sell works worth more than $ 28 million.
A total of 353 bids were submitted for this work, and in the first hour of trading, the amount of bids for the lot reached $ 1 million. It is the third most expensive art piece sold by a living artist, Decrypt reports. And the fourth place is adjusted for inflation, that is, the depreciation of the common currency.
Beeple’s Twitter reaction instead of a thousand words
The event was commented by the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance Changpeng Zhao. He believes that what is happening today confidently determines the future of the industry. Here’s a quote from him on Twitter.
In the future, real art will be sold exclusively for cryptocurrency. Do you still sell your work for fiat currencies? It’s time to adapt to reality.
Although this is the first purely digital artwork sold by Christie’s, it is not the first NFT to go under the hammer at auction. As we have already said, in October last year, the auction house sold a «portrait» of the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, consisting of large round canvases on which historical data about the main cryptocurrency was applied. Although the piece itself was physical, it was assigned a unique token. The transaction price at that time was 130 thousand dollars .
NFT as a new trend in the digital assets industry never ceases to amaze with its rapid growth, which can only be compared with last year’s hype around the decentralized finance sector. In addition to the work of Beeple, of particular interest are the unique CryptoPunks tokens, accompanied by simple pixel art illustrations. Yesterday one of these works was sold for 4200 ethers or the equivalent of $ 8 million . And the amount of the transaction is not as interesting as the net profit of the first buyer of this particular «crypto bank».
He bought the token back in 2018 at a price of only $ 15,000 , CryptoPotato reports. That is, in almost three years, his net profit on the deal was approximately $ 7.8 million .
And this is a great example of the so-called hodl, although in this case we are not talking specifically about cryptocurrency. At the same time, the collector was able to preserve the unique work, wait for a big wave of hype for digital art and make money on it. Obviously, three years ago, he clearly did not suspect that work for 15 thousand dollars would rise in price hundreds of times in a relatively short period of time.
Token trading history
From this, we can conclude that the NFT sphere will become a cult phenomenon even outside the cryptocurrency industry. Unique tokens provide content creators with an excellent opportunity to successfully monetize their digital artwork, which until recently was not possible on a decentralized basis. In addition, the parties to the transaction are protected from counterfeiting and dishonest sellers who would like to make money on stolen jobs.
We believe that the sale of Mike Winklemann’s work at Christie’s marks a new step in the development of NFT tokens and the blockchain industry in general. Thanks to her, even critics of cryptocurrencies will become obvious that modern technologies are seriously improving human life in various areas, and Bitcoin, Ethereum and other popular coins are not exclusively «a tool of speculation.» Therefore, further it is worth waiting for both the popularization of the digital art niche and the more active adoption of blockchain assets.
