A detail shot from a collage “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”, by a digital artist BEEPLE, presented at auction at Christie’s, unknown location, in this undated handout obtained by Reuters.
Beeple | Christie’s Images Ltd. | via Reuters
The buyer of the $ 69 million Beeple non-fungible sign was a crypto-investor who goes by the pseudonym Metakovan.
The actual identity of Metakovan is not known, but the investor is the co-founder of the NFT collection called Metapurse, which collects NFTs to display in virtual museums in the metavers. Metakovan already owns the largest collection of Beeples and has fractionalized the ownership of one collection of Beeples with a special token called the B.20 Coin.
CNBC spoke to Metakovan’s partner in Metapurse, called Twobadour, who said the NFT was ‘the most valuable work of its generation’.
Twobadour said they do not know their exact plans for this work, but the options include fractionating it or presenting it as a new sign. He said the goal is not to make money, but to decentralize and democratize art so that cartoonists can share a piece of history everywhere and share the wealth.
For example, it is as if people could go to the Museum of Modern Art and own some of the work, he said.
“We made history and created a god” in Beeple, he said.
The announcement solves only the biggest mystery behind the most dramatic transaction in the art world since Leonardo sold DaVinci’s “Salvator Mundi” for $ 450 million in 2017. The market for NFTs – which could be any digital asset whose ownership is recorded on a blockchain – has exploded to more than $ 400 million in recent weeks as a large new army of young collectors pay record prices for everything, from NBA to videos to cat memes and art.
For his $ 69 million, Metakovan will receive “essentially a long line of numbers and letters,” according to Noah Davis, an art specialist at Christie’s. “This is a code that exists on the Ethereum blockchain. It is a block in the chain that will fall into their Ethereum wallet.” The buyer also gets a ‘giant JPEG’, Davis said.
The sale offered a maximum of two weeks of insane online bidding and ushered in a new era in collectibles, where prices for blockchain-based digital images now pay the staggering prices for Picassos and Monets. While the future of NFT awards and their long-term role in the art world remains an open question, and many view it as a speculative fad, the price of eight figures for the Beeple has caused the art world to suddenly take notice.
Shortly after the auction, Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, tweeted: “holy f —” On Thursday night, he also tweeted an image of a digitized “Mona Lisa” with the caption: “THE NEXT CHAPTER.”
The record work, called ‘The First 5,000 days’, sold for the first time in a large auction house.
In 2007, Winkelmann posted a new work of digital art every day for the rest of his life and has not missed a single day. The first 5,000 of the works, which he calls ‘Everydays’, were put together to form ‘The first 5,000 days’.