Recently, the NFT artwork "Every Day: The First 5,000 Days", which has aroused market discussion, was sold at Christie's auction house for 69.34 million US dollars (about 450 million yuan). This price not only set a new record for virtual art auctions, but also puts creator Beeple on the throne of the top three selling prices for living artists, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
The lot for this auction is a mosaic collection of works created daily by artist Mike Winkelman (stage name Beeple) since 2013, and what is special is that the work itself is stored in the form of non-homogeneous tokens, a digital certificate of authenticity based on blockchain technology. Compared with the more familiar homogeneous virtual currency in the market, NFTs provide obvious convenience for the confirmation and trading of unique digital assets in the Internet era.
Noah Davis, an expert at Christie's who organized the auction, said in an interview that the first day the work was on the shelves was one of the most amazing events he had ever seen in his auction career. In just eight minutes, the price jumped from a $100 starting price to $1 million, and only about three of the more than 20 competitors who made the main bid had previously dealt with the auction house.
Davis revealed that there were many customers at the auction who were "very obsessed" with the work, most of them people who were very fascinated by crypto, including early investors in cryptocurrencies, or businesses that ran a lot of investment in the field.
It is worth mentioning that Christie's also accepted digital currency as a payment method when arranging this auction, and further clarified the acceptance of buyers to pay for bids using ETH. This also means that auction houses need to bear the risks arising from large fluctuations in virtual currencies.
In addition to the art field, NFT transactions and auctions have also frequently "gone out of the circle" recently. The most iconic event was this week's public auction of social media Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet after he went live on Twitter, which will end on March 21, with the highest bid in recent days fixed at $2.5 million.
Link – What exactly is an NFT?
The full name of the NFT is Non-Fungible Token, which is interpreted as a non-homogeneous token. NFTs are considered unique digital products, distinguishing them from tokens that can be exchanged equivalently, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. It is also understood as a carrier of digital certificates. The objects of NFTs are not limited to works of art, but also include virtual pets, star cards, game equipment, records, etc.
The history of NFTs dates back to 2014 and became widely known in 2017 as "CryptoKitties." The game once sparked Ethereum's online cat-keeping frenzy, which led to network congestion, and the more "beautiful" cats in the game even sold for $580,000.
At present, the NFT field has formed a huge ecosystem. According to the different functions and roles, the NFT ecosystem can subdivide a number of different tracks, such as a public chain focusing on building NFT infrastructure, a trading platform that provides NFT liquidity, an NFT platform that provides different application scenarios (such as virtual games, fashion collections, etc.), and more interesting NFT+DeFi.
Among them, artwork has become one of the most popular uses of NFTs. In July 2020, an NFT artwork called "Picasso's Bull" sold for $55,000; soon after, another NFT work reflecting bitcoin price volatility, "The Right Place and Time," also sold for more than $100,000.
The first time an NFT work appeared on the auction market was at Christie's on October 7, 2020. At the time, artist Ben Zhen Dili depicted the 21st in Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto's NFT art series Portrait of the Mind, which fetched $131,300 at Christie's, higher than the initial estimate of $12,000 to $18,000. This is also the first time that NFT digital artworks have been sold at internationally renowned auctions, and since then NFTs have been brought into the mainstream art market.
Entering 2021, as cryptocurrencies continue to heat up, NFTs have also begun to rise. "Every Day: The First 5,000 Days" sold for more than $69 million, breaking NFT's sales record. This not only allowed the NFT to "get out of the loop" completely, but also made Christie's the first large auction house to offer pure digital works with unique NFTs and accept cryptocurrencies. In the final moments of the bidding, about 22 million viewers watched the live auction.
Source | Yangzi Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Huang Yanwen
Source: Yangtze Evening News