On 11 March 2021 Christie’s closed an online single-lot sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days — a collage of 5,000 daily images by Mike Winkelmann — for $69,346,250. The house called it the first purely digital NFT work at a major auctioneer, and said the price put Beeple among the three most expensive living artists at auction. Bidding had opened 25 February at $100. The winning bid, later attributed to Metakovan of Metapurse, was paid in ether, on the order of 42,000 ETH. Around 22 million people watched the close on Christies.com, the house said.
An NFT here is a token on Ethereum that says who owns this edition. It is not a copyright statute, not a guarantee the file is private, and not a reason to buy a profile picture. We will not tell you to collect.
What happened
Auction houses sell scarce objects to people who want a receipt. Digital art had a receipt problem: copies are free. A unique token is a receipt the chain will keep. The collage can still be screenshotted. The thing that sold is the token plus the social fact that Christie’s ran the sale. Gas, wallet risk, and a boom in lookalike drops are the retail spillover.
Why it matters
If you care about art markets, a 255-year-old house taking ETH is a distribution fact. If you are being sold “the JPEG is yours forever” in a Discord, you are being sold a ticker. See how to read a crypto headline without getting played. See how crypto wallets actually work before you sign a mint.
What happens next
Copycat sales, a lot of worthless tokens, and a later winter. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, mint, or hold an NFT, or to buy ether.
