By
staff writer
May 17th, 2024
Christie’s auction house noted that 91% of the 33 bidders for the Beeple NFT were new to the platform.
A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) by renowned digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple has been auctioned at approximately $69 million. As reported by CNBC, the sale which was carried by auction house Christie’s ranks as the most expensive NFT ever sold at an auction.
The NFT boom has continued to shake the blockchain, crypto, and decentralized finance ecosystems as a whole as they continue to sell at never-before-seen prices for digital artworks, and other unique creations. The sale of Beeple’s NFT dubbed “The First 5,000 days” by Christie’s – a deal to conduct the auction was confirmed back in February – came as compensation for the diligence deployed to curate the pooled unique items created by the artist for a long period of time.
Back in 2007, Winkelmann set out to create one digital artwork per day, and he has not missed a day since then. The First 5000 days is a combination of all the work he has been creating for more than a decade, with the selling amount arguably worth the effort. Per the CNBC report, Beeple’s NFT positions the artist as the top three most valuable artists in history following Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
“At this point, especially after today’s Christie’s sale, it’s not a question of whether NFTs will have an impact on the so-called traditional art market, but to what degree its impact will be felt,” said Andrew Goldstein, editor-in-chief of Artnet News. He added that the price is a sign a new group of technology-enabled collectors can “destabilize the establishment in attention-grabbing ways.”
NFTs are here to stay with a growing list of items including short NBA videos, music recordings, and others making their way into the hands of collectors.
“As soon as I saw it, I saw it as this massive, massive potential for this as a platform for digital ownership of a bunch of different things, not just art,” Beeple said. “Moving forward, I think this will be seen an alternate form of asset class,” added he.
Beeple NFT Auction Attracts Millennials
While many in the older generation may yet wonder how a non-physical item can sell for millions of dollars, millennials are carving out recognition as the next generation of unique art collectors. Christie’s auction house noted that of the 33 bidders for the Beeple NFT, 91% of them were new to the platform, with close to two-thirds being millennials or younger and are residents in the United States of America.
This trend is not surprising as millennials are at the forefront of championing the cryptocurrency revolution. One of the notable bidders of Beeple’s work is Justin Sun, the Founder of the Tron blockchain and the TRX cryptocurrency. Against earlier claims by Bloomberg that Sun threw in the winning bid for the auctioned piece, a later CoinDesk report noted he was outbid by an unidentified participant.
The sale of the biggest art-based NFT in history is projected to ticker interest amongst other auction houses in the near future, but at the time of writing, none of such outfits has expressed interest in trailing Christie’s path.