Nyan Cat turns ten in April (do you feel old?) And to celebrate the birthday of one of the healthiest memes on the Internet, the artist behind the gif, Chris Torres, put on a recently remastered version the auction. On Friday, the piece was sold for 300 Ether on the Art Cryptography Platform Foundation, which translates to approximately $ 587,000 based on the value of the cryptocurrency at the time of publication.
In an interview with the Virgin, Torres said he never plans to sell another original Nyan Cat image file, meaning that now the pattern of this gif owns a truly unique piece.
“I think it’s great to know you’re the only piece that exists,” he told the network. “And I think Nyan Cat will be very special.”
Torres made a number of modifications and changes to the gif for almost a decade, which included enlarging the gif and making minor tweaks to the art to correct the details that bothered him over the years. For example, a particular star would randomly appear and disappear in the original 12-frame animation, so he took this opportunity to remove it completely. Torres told the Virgin that he believed the remastered version “came out really well this time.”
If your eyebrows shot up at this price of thousands of dollars, you should know that the crypto art market is having a fantastic time. In recent years, several online platforms have emerged, such as SuperRare, Zora, and Nifty Gateway, where artists and patrons exchange digital works worth thousands of real-world dollars. The foundation is one of the newest faces on the scene, as it was launched just two weeks ago, but reportedly already recorded $ 410.00 in sales for Virgin.
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These cryptographic art platforms typically sell works using “non-fungible tokens” or NFTs, digital tokens based on blockchains that represent unique assets. Because NFTs are not divisible and there is no similar one, ownership can be verified and tracked using blockchain. While it should be noted that on many cryptographic platforms, actual sales, such as the new and improved Nyan Cat gif, are made with Ether, a cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is only second to Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization and volume, according to Reuters.
The cryptographic community has long been rumored to have NFTs, but traditional branches of the art world have only recently begun to adopt blockchain technology. This week, Christie’s famous auction house announced its first auction of a purely NFT-based collection: “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, a digital artist the NFT-based digital work series was sold by $ 3.5 million in December. Christie’s too confirmed with Bloomberg which plans to accept Ether as payment for the main price of the work (collectors will have to use old dollars to cover the additional fees of the auction houses).