By
Temitope Olatunji
April 26th, 2024
Christie’s, a famous British auction will put on the auction its first Non-Fungible Token (NFT) inspire by Robert Alice. Only highly motivated and deep-pocketed blockchain enthusiasts can make such investments as the quoted price is high.
Popular British Auction house Christie’s is set to auction its first piece of Non-Fungible Token (NFT), a Bitcoin (BTC) inspired artwork by Robert Alice. As Cointelegraph reported, Robert Alice, an art historian turned blockchain artist drew inspiration from the Bitcoin codebase to create a series of 40 paintings stretching over 50 meters in length.
The Portrait dubbed “Portrait of a Mind” is a handcrafted piece of art showcasing the 12.3 million digits of codes deployed in launching BTC back in 2008. As Alice explained, the project will “draw up a global network of 40 collectors where no one individual will hold all the code.” It aims to do this by splitting the codebase into 40 globally distributed fragments. Alice explained further:
“In each work, an algorithm has found a set of hex digits that together are highlighted in gold. These read a set of coordinates that are unique to each painting. 40 locations across 40 paintings – each location is of particular significance to the history of Bitcoin.”
Alice noted that most people particularly Bitcoin lovers and enthusiasts are more awed by BTC published Whitepaper, without any recourse to the source codes which is arguably the most unique thing about the premier digital currency.
According to Cointelegraph, Christie’s will sell one painting from the series, “Block 21 (42.36433° N, -71.26189° E),” as part of its “Post-War and Contemporary Day Auction” on Oct. 7, at the end of a week-long exhibition of auctioned works in New York. Each of the NFT art pieces will have about $12,000 to $18,000 as its asking price.
Christie’s NFT, Mirrors Growing NFT Art Ecosystem
The Non-Fungible Token ecosystem is a growing ecosystem that is seeing the rise of skilled artists in the space. As a reminder, a non-fungible token, also known as a nifty, is a special type of cryptographic token which represents something unique; non-fungible tokens are thus not mutually interchangeable by their individual specification.
The development of artworks as NFTs is thus predicated upon the uniqueness of each artist’s work which makes it distinct from one another. Most of these artists come to leverage the power of blockchain to produce a digital version of their piece for easy auctioning on sites like Christie’s.
Just as the quoted price for Robert Alice’s Christie’s NFT is high, so also are artworks or NFT creations expensive and only the highly motivated and deep-pocketed blockchain enthusiasts can make investments in the area. A notable example of investors in this niche is Binance, which purchased 4,012 LANDS each of which is a non-fungible token representing a piece of unique virtual real estate in The Sandbox metaverse, an NFT marketplace, such as Christie’s is similarly modeling.
While the NFT art world has its prospects, the current purveyors of NFTs rely on the power and uniqueness of their creations to attract investors.