Famous auction house Christie sold its first purely digital artwork for a whopping $69 million to rake in the highest ever price so far, for a nonfungible token (NFT).
Titled as “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, the digital work has been created by Mike Winkelmann, who is known as Beeple. It is a collage of 5000 drawings, each of these being created and posted every day for the past 13 and a half years.
These drawings were originally created with pen and paper and now mostly with illustration software. The sketches cover an array of subjects, ranging from an angular line drawing of Winkelmann’s first baby to Hillary Clinton and popular cartoon characters.
The digital pictures of Beeple have got him 1.8 million followers on Instagram and collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Katy Perry and Nike.
The winning bidder owns the work in the form of a unique string of code, called a non-fungible token. The piece has no physical presence and "will be delivered directly from Beeple to the buyer, accompanied by a unique NFT encrypted with the artist’s unforgeable signature and uniquely identified on the blockchain," Christie's said.
What is NFT?
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are cryptographic assets on blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other. Unlike cryptocurrencies, they cannot be traded or exchanged at equivalency.
NFT becoming popular
In recent times, NFTs have surged in popularity. Last month, singer and visual artist Grimes sold $6 million worth of digital art, while Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO auctioned off his first tweet, a March 21, 2006, post, that reads “just setting up my twttr” — as a nonfungible token. Currently the bidding is at $2.5 million.
Talking about the bidding for Beeple’s work, Noah Davis, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art for Christie's, told Yahoo Finance, "The first 10 minutes of this sale we had more than 100 bids placed. We went from an opening bid of $100 to more than $1 million. We had bidders from seven different countries."
An interesting aspect of NFT is that it generates a future stream of profits for the artist each time the work changes hands. Jimmy Simmons, digital artist told NBC News: “Every time that token is traded, I will get 10 percent. It’s a new frontier, a new contract."
Christie for the first time accepted cryptocurrency as a form of payment in the auction. It noted that bidders "may elect to make payment of the purchase price for this lot in the cryptocurrency Ether. Payment in Ether must be made via a digital wallet transfer of Ether to Christie’s."
