A Piece Of Digital Artwork Just Auctioned For

A Stunning $69 Million!

When Christie's set out to auction its first-ever digital-only artwork —

"Everydays: The First 5000 Days"— on March 1, 2021, they had fully expected
it to fetch more than the minimum bid of $100. However, the 255-year-old
British auction house had never in its wildest dreams envisioned that the
unique masterpiece, minted by Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, would fetch a
record $60.25 million ($69.3 million with fees).

This is the highest price ever paid for a purely digital piece of art and the third-
highest for the work of a living artist. Topping the list is Jeff Koons,
whose "Rabbit" sold for $91.1 million in 2019, followed by David Hockney,
whose "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" fetched $90.2 million in
2018.

Christie's says the online auction, conducted over ten days,

drew widespread interest from Beeple fans worldwide. The bid price rapidly
escalated from $4 million on March 5, 2021, to over $14 million by the morning
of March 11, 2021. It steadily rose to $37.5 million before soaring to $50
million in the auction's final few minutes, and, then, to
the unprecedented hammer price of $60.25 million. Fittingly, the
digital masterpiece was paid for in Ethereum — a digital currency traded via
online exchanges and stored in various types of cryptocurrency wallets.
Play
00:00
-06:01
Mute
Settings
Enter fullscreen
Play

The winning buyer was later identified as Vignesh Sundaresan, a Singapore-

based crypto investor and co-founder of NFT fund Metapurse. Sundaresan,
who goes by the pseudonym Metakovan, told CNBC News that he would
have willingly paid even more for the digital image. “This NFT is
a significant piece of art history," the entrepreneur explained. “Sometimes
these things take some time for everyone to recognize and realize. I’m OK with
that. I had the opportunity to be part of this very important shift in how art has
been perceived for centuries.”
Winkelmann's quest to publish a daily digital artwork under the nickname
Beeple began in May 2007, with a caricature of his uncle Joe. While initially
meant to market his skills to corporations such as Apple and Adobe, the
talented artist soon gained a loyal fan base eager to see his "everydays."
However, despite having over 2 million followers on Instagram, Beeple was
unable to sell his digital artwork. That's because it was hard for
a potential buyer to claim ownership of something that could be easily and
endlessly duplicated.
Play
00:00
-05:40
Mute
Settings
Enter fullscreen
Play

However, that changed in 2019, after Beeple imprinted all his artwork with

non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Built on the same technology as popular
cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, NFTs allow artists and
collectors to prove and track ownership of digital assets. The purchaser of an
NFT receives a record and a hash code showing ownership of the
unique token associated with the particular digital asset, not the asset itself.
While the contract may include other associated rights — such as the
permission to use, copy, and display the images and/or video associated with
the NFT for personal, non-commercial use — they are not guaranteed. The
technology has been around since 2015, but NFTs only began to
gain traction with the online collecting world in 2017, after the blockchain
Ethereum introduced a new standard that supported the unique tokens. Their
popularity has increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beeple sold his first two NFT art pieces in October 2020 for over $60,000 each
and a third, in February 2021, for a nifty $6.6 million! Buoyed by the success,
the artist collaborated with Christie's to create a collage of the first 5000
"everydays" images he has produced since 2007, and the rest, as they say, is
history!
The adoption of NFTs allowed Beeple to start monetizing his art (Credit: Christie's)

The thrilled multimillionaire says, “Artists have been using hardware and
software to create artwork and distribute it on the internet for the last 20+
years, but there was never a real way to truly own and collect it. With NFTs,
that has now changed. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the next
chapter in art history, digital art.”
Artists are not the only ones benefiting from the NFT mania. On March 22,
2021, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first-ever tweet, offered for sale as an NFT,
was snapped up by a Malaysia-based businessman for 1,630.58 ether, worth
about $2.9 million at the time of the purchase. Dorsey plans to donate the
proceeds from the March 21, 2006, tweet, which read, "just setting up my
twttr," to charity.