A detail taken from a collage “Everyday: The First 5000 Days,” by digital artist BEEPLE, which is up for auction at Christie’s, an unknown location, in this undated document obtained by Reuters.
Beeple | Christie’s Images Ltd. | via Reuters
The buyer of the non-expendable Beeple token for $ 69 million was a cryptocurrency investor who goes by the pseudonym Metakovan.
The real identity of Metakovan is not known, but the investor is the co-founder of the NFT collection called Metapurse, which collects NFT to display on the metavers through virtual museums. Metakovan already owns the largest collection of bees and has split the ownership of a collection of bees with a special witness called the B.20 coin.
CNBC spoke with Metakovan’s partner at Metapurse, called Twobadour, who said the NFT is “the most valuable work of its generation.”
Twobadour said they are unaware of his exact plans for the job, but options include splitting it up or offering it as a new witness. He said the goal is not to make money, but to decentralize and democratize art so that token holders everywhere can share a piece of history and share wealth.
For example, it’s as if people could go to the Museum of Modern Art and actually own some of the works, he said.
“We made history and created a god,” Beeple said.
The announcement only partially solves the biggest mystery behind the most dramatic transaction in the art world since Leonardo DaVinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold for $ 450 million in 2017. NFT (which can be any digital asset whose property is registered in a blockchain) has exploded in recent weeks to over $ 400 million, as a new army of young collectors pays record prices for everything , from featured NBA videos to cat memes and art.
For his $ 69 million, Metakovan will get “essentially a long string of numbers and letters,” according to Noah Davis, an art specialist at Christie’s. “It’s code that exists in the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a blockchain that will drop into your Ethereum wallet.” The buyer also gets “a giant JPEG,” Davis said.
The sale limited two weeks of frenzy offered online and ushered in a new era in collecting, where the prices of blockchain-based digital images are now the prices paid by Picasso and Monets. While the future of NFT pricing and its long-term role in the art world remains an open question, and many see it as a speculative fad, the Beeple’s eight-figure price has made the art world suddenly realized.
Shortly after the auction result, Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, tweeted: “holy f —” Thursday night, he also tweeted an image of a digitized “Mona Lisa” titled: NEXT CHAPTER “.
The record work, called “The First 5,000 Days,” was the first to be sold in a large auction house.
In 2007, Winkelmann set out to publish a new work of digital art every day for the rest of his life and not a single day has been lost. The first 5,000 of these works, which he calls “Everyday,” were compiled to form “The First 5,000 Days.”