On Thursday, a digital artwork less than a month old hammered for $60.25 million at Christie’s in New York, shattering every previous record set for the medium and pushing the NFT market into the price range of blue-chip masterworks. With buyer’s premium the total comes to $69 million.
"Everydays: the First 5,000 Days" is a mosaic of every image that artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the name Beeple, has made since 2013. The artwork is attached to a non-fungible token (NFT), a digital certificate of authenticity that runs on blockchain technology. Unlike some of his other artworks, Everydays doesn’t come with anything physical (a box, a plaque) attached. Bidding opened at $100 on Feb. 25.
“The first day of bidding was one of the most magical events in my auction career,” says Noah Davis, a specialist at Christie’s who organized the sale. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
What’s an NFT?
In the first eight minutes of bidding, Davis says, about 20 bidders pushed the work to $1 million. “Only three [of the bidders] were known to us previously.”
The buyer of the work was not immediately known, but Davis says that “there have been a handful of really dogged, really serious clients pursuing it, and they are mostly people who are very steeped in crypto.
“Whether that means they’re early investors in crypto, or they run and operate businesses that have significant investment in crypto technology,” he continues, “they’re all very savvy, ‘#online’ people.”
Paying With Cryptocurrency
When Christie’s announced the sale last month, it made waves when it revealed that it would accept cryptocurrency as payment; the caveat was that the buyer’s premium had to be in a traditional currency.
But as the days went on and people continued to push the price even higher, that policy changed.