This JPG NFT Sold For $69,346,250 & The World Will Never Be the Same
A few months ago Beeple, a prolific artist who has been pumping out work every day for over 14 years finally became an overnight success. A collection of his pieces sold as NFTs (along with a physical digital display case posted out) and made over $3.5 million in a weekend. NFT is a hot new term that you should probably learn a little about if you’re going to be having a discussion with anybody who’s on the internet in 2021. In the simplest terms, an NFT is a “non-fungible token”, a completely unique token on the Etherium blockchain, which can be traded between users. It can represent anything the seller decides and have terms that allow royalties of the NFT to funnel back to the original creator. This is handy for artists in particular who under normal circumstances would only see returns from an initial sale, an NFT changes that by making sure a percentage of the profit from any subsequent sale is painlessly transferred back to them as royalties. This is perhaps the juiciest information for digital artists out there.
So what sort of perks do you get from buying an NFT? Well it depends on what’s written into the contract, which is usually not a whole lot. “There’s nobody who’s serious about NFTs who really humors the idea that what you’re selling is the copyright or the master,” says Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, who sold their latest single along with some art earlier this year. So really, if you want to buy a jpg and do stuff with it you might be better off going to Getty images. But if you wanted to buy the idea of owning a meme on an overly complicated spreadsheet then boy, do we have a deal for you.
A few months on from that windfall weekend for Beeple, he’s back again, and grabbing even more headlines. The classic art auction house Christie’s managed to find a way to keep itself relevant in an almost entirely digital world by selling the jpg “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” on the 12th of March for a whopping $69,346,250. If this were a physical piece, it’s price would put it in the top 50 highest selling of all time. This sale has made him among the top 3 most valuable living artists on the planet.
So who bought the piece? Well, their identity remained mysterious for some time but it was revealed that a user going by the name of Metakovan bought the piece. He revealed himself as Indian tech entrepreneur, Vignesh Sundaresan, a self described “entrepreneur, coder and angel investor” in blockchain technology. He is a co-founder of Metapurse, which advertises itself as a crypto-exclusive fund that specialises in identifying early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate.
$69 million might be a lot to pay for a piece of art, but when you factor it into the marketing budget for your company, it might just be worth it.
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