Buying The Everydays
“It was excruciating actually,” says Twobadour.
“It’s an unfamiliar experience bidding on Christie’s—it wasn’t very gentle on the nerves,” he continues. Of his role in the endeavor as the unofficial “steward of Metapurse,” he says, “I try to look for really significant NFTs. Metakovan is the founder of Metapurse, and he puts his money where my mouth is.”
“Twenty-two million visitors tuned in for the final minutes of bidding,” says Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman of 20th and 21st century art. “There’s a lot of excitement out there, but there’s real interest, too. We had over 200 registrants for this auction that were really serious about it.”
Metakovan paid using Ether, the world’s second-biggest digital coin; approximately 42,329.453 ETH total, according to a Christie’s rep. Accepting crytpocurrency is a first for the 254-year-old auction house and a major nod to the payment form’s legitimacy. A 10:11 a.m. EST on Mar. 11, a short time after the lot hammered, Ether was trading at $1,815 to the dollar.
Money In Context
Not only is $69 million the most ever paid for a digital artwork, it’s just behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney for the auction record of any living artist, period. Taken out of the context of the art market though, that number is even more impressive.
That amount of money could buy you a collection of legitimate palaces in France, Ireland, and Italy, with about $30 million to spare; it could just get you the highly coveted Gulfstream G700, though let’s hope you have enough money for maintenance and air time; or you could leave the money in a conservative index fund and let it appreciate. Left alone for a decade and assuming annual compound interest of 7%, your money would more than double to $135.7 million.
And yet given how wildly NFTs have been appreciating—another one of Beeple’s pieces was bought for $67,000 last October, then flipped four months later for $6.6 million—the market would appear to also have the potential for outsize returns.
“We’re not engaging in things that feel bubbly to us,” Metakovan says of investing in NFTs. “There are so many things which can be out of control. It’s not regulated, which is a good and a bad thing, so there are going to be opportunities where people make money and people lose money.”
Metakovan, who says that he doesn’t own a house, doesn’t own a car, and “just tries to be physically light, so that I can pack and move around,” hasn’t yet sat down to admire the piece. “It is the most expensive purchase I’ve done,” he says.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.