How Beeple became an overnight NFT sensation.
Auction house Christieʼs sold the work “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, for $ 69.3 million in a non-fungible token (NFT), according to the auction house’s website. This is a record price per NFT.
A JPG file was put up for auction – a collage of all the images that the artist has published daily on the Internet for five thousand days since 2007.
According to The New York Times, the auction took place over two weeks, with a starting price of $100. In the last few seconds of the auction, a lot of bids were received, which is why the auction was extended by two minutes.
Beeple’s work value was the third-highest auction price for a work by a living artist, behind Jeff Koons ($ 91.1 million) and David Hockney ($ 90.3 million).
The price of Beeple’s digital work has surpassed the value of many physical paintings by artists such as Eugene Delacroix, Marcel Duchamp, and Francisco Goya, NYT notes.
“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is the first NFT work sold by Christieʼs in its 255-year history. During the auction, the auction house for the first time accepted Ethereum as a payment method.
Read more: A JPEG image sold for $69 million. We’ll tell you how.
