Digital art piece NFT sold for record breaking $69 million

by Mark Tyson on 12 March 2021, 13:11

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NFT artists are making millions with the craze for their digital artwork soaring. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, provide a blockchain-backed proof of ownership on an item that the token is attached to. So, instead of holding money, these blockchain tokens hold art, music, or other digital goods. Yesterday, world-famous auction house Christie's sold a piece of NFT artwork for an incredible $69 million.

The artwork under the spotlight, 'Everydays: The First 5,000 Days' by Mike Winkelmann (AKA Beeple), was put up for auction in Feb, and setup as the first auction to accept cryptocurrency bids, particularly ETH. By 5th March bids had reached $3.5 million, and the auction closed with a winning bid of $69,346,250 yesterday. This makes Winkelmann "among the top three most valuable living artists," according to a Christie's Tweet.

'Everydays: The First 5,000 Days' is a work worthy of proper description. Back in May 2007, Beeple posted a piece of unique digital art online, he continued in this endeavour day-in day-out for over 5,000 days, as per the title (about 13 and a half years). 'Everydays' is a collage of these images. Moreover, Beeple is a well known person in the digital art world with 1.9 million Instagram followers and various collaborations with the likes of Nike and Louis Vuitton under his belt.

Yahoo News points out it isn't just the visual arts that are embracing digital sales via NFTs. Hoping to join the ranks of NFT successes like Beeple and the Nyan Cat creator, are the Kings of Leon who intend to be the first major recording artists to release an album as an NFT. Of course in the case of this music, there will be multiple NFT 'coins', and in this case they will infer further rights like limited-edition vinyl, front row seats to future concerts, and album artworks.

Another NFT in the news recently was the auctioning of Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey's first Tweet, reproduced above. This auction ends on 21st March and is currently bid up to $2.5 million. Auction proceeds are going to charity.



HEXUS Forums :: 22 Comments

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This is awesome
This is such a dumb trend and such a waste of energy! :redcard: Welcome to the next Tulip Mania.

I found this video useful to understand what NFT's are, I was particularly interested on the power consumption, it's bad!: NFT Explained: Why They're Nifty and Terrible (He does need to sort his camera's auto-focus!)

Also the “verifiable ownership” argument is one of the supposed positive… there are other ways to prove ownership… Copyright law has been around a lot longer. And there are court cases where ownership has been determined for example, songs in the 90's, long before NFT's or bitcoin existed (I assume these are relatively new!). All done without massive energy consumption.
idiot with too much money, money that could have and should have helped others in need.
Well people can spend their honest earned money as they please, but i reserve the right to have a opinion on that transaction.

And i call stupid.
Scryder
This is such a dumb trend and such a waste of energy! :redcard: Welcome to the next Tulip Mania.

I found this video useful to understand what NFT's are, I was particularly interested on the power consumption, it's bad!: NFT Explained: Why They're Nifty and Terrible (He does need to sort his camera's auto-focus!)

Also the “verifiable ownership” argument is one of the supposed positive… there are other ways to prove ownership… Copyright law has been around a lot longer. And there are court cases where ownership has been determined for example, songs in the 90's, long before NFT's or bitcoin existed (I assume these are relatively new!). All done without massive energy consumption.

I thoroughly agree with all of your statement. However I've highlighted in bold a piece of particular importance. People have already been tokenising other peoples work without their permission.

i.e. the whole point of this NFT utter, utter garbage already doesn't work.