• Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist, recently sold an NFT artwork for $69 million

• The sale took place in Christie’s auction house and catapults Beeple into the top three living artists in the world

• NFTs give users the ability to buy, hold and sell digital tokens using blockchain, allowing them to track the authenticity of the particular item

• Beeple’s sale shows that NFTs are gaining popularity and has a wide range of applications from sports, music and art

Digital artist Mike Winkelmann who goes by the pseudonym, Beeple sold his artwork for an impressive $69 million at a Christie’s auction. This sale easily puts Beeple amongst the most valuable top three living artists in the world and heralds an era of wide acceptability for NFTs. 

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are revolutionary tech based on blockchain that gives users the ability to purchase and sell digital tokens that cannot be duplicated. 

Through NFTs, the origins and transaction history of a particular token can be easily verified, stifling the incidences of thefts and forgeries. Beeple’s $69 million sale signals an increasing adoption of NFTs in different facets of life.

$69 Million Piece And The Future Of NFTs

Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple sold his artwork, Everydays – The First 5000 Days at an auction at Christie’s for a whopping $69 million. This is an impressive feat because it is the first-ever NFT art to be auctioned at Christie.

The auction house, Christie’s said that the art sale easily puts Beeple “among the top three most valuable living artists” in the world. In speaking on the NTF technology, Winkelmann says he “views this as the next chapter of art history. Now there is a way to collect digital art”

Before October 2020, the most he had ever earned on his art pieces was $100 but all that quickly changed through NFTs after Beeple sold his first batch of NFTs, with a pair going for $66,666.66 each. 

In December, he struck fortune when he sold another batch of his work for $3.5 million. The first batch that Beeple sold for $66,666.66 was resold for an impressive $6.6 million. These figures are alluring to many struggling artists who may want to make the switch from the traditional methods of selling their art to NFTs.

Beeple’s work has become valuable because of his large following on social media which he gained by launching a project called Everydays in which he publishes digital artwork every day. The project is now in its 14th year. The piece sold at Christie’s is a collage of the first five thousand days of the Everydays project.

On the Flipside

• Decentralized finance project Meerkat Finance has claimed it was hacked, losing more than $31 million in the process

• The project was launched just one day after launching on the Binance Smart Chain.

• The DeFi project reported that its vault was drained of 13.96 million BUSD and 73,653 BNB

The Growth of the NTF Market

NFTs allows users to buy and sell unique digital tokens, cannot be replicated and can be traced back to the original creator. Its popularity and use have been growing in recent times following its wide application in the field of sports, gaming, and art.

This sale marks a huge move in the right direction for the NTF market. As Noah Davis, a post-war art specialist puts it, “it was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do.”

Rodriguez-Fraile, the collector who flipped Beeple’s first NFT for $6.6 million opines that the next wave of artists and collectors will come to see NFTs as simply the way art is bought and sold. He describes it as “the catalyst for a generation.”