Nyan Cat turns 10 in April (do you still feel old?), And to celebrate the anniversary of one of the Internet’s most wholesome memes, the artist behind the poison, Chris Torres, has released a new version offered at the auction. On Friday, the piece sold for 300 Ether on the crypto-art platform Foundation, which translated about $ 587,000 based on the value of the cryptocurrency at the time of publication.
In an interview with the edge, Torres said he never intends to sell another original image file of Nyan Cat, meaning that this poison’s patron now owns a unique piece.
“I think it’s cool to know you have the only piece that exists,” he said. “And I feel like Nyan Cat will be a very special one to own.”
Torres made a series of adjustments and changes to the nearly decade-old poison, which included enlarging the poison and making small tricks to correct the art to correct details that had plagued him over the years. . For example, one particular star would randomly appear and disappear in the original 12-frame animation, and he took the opportunity to just remove it completely. Torres told the Verge that he thought the remastered version ‘got really good this time’.
If you are raising eyebrows at the price of over a thousand dollars, you should know that the crypto art market has one hell of a moment. A number of online platforms have emerged over the past few years, such as SuperRare, Zora and Nifty Gateway, where artists and patrons exchange thousands of dollars worth of digital works. Foundation is one of the newest faces on the scene, which was launched just two weeks ago, but reportedly has already raised $ 410.00 in sales.
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These crypto-art platforms typically sell works through “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs, blockchain-based digital tokens that represent unique assets. Since NFTs are not divisible and no one is the same, their ownership can be verified and tracked by blockchain. It should be noted, however, that on many crypto-art platforms the actual sales, such as those of the new and improved Nyan Cat poison, are made with Ether, a crypto-currency running on the Ethereum blockchain and the second only for Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization and volume, according to Reuters.
The crypto community has been buzzing about NFTs for a while now, but traditional branches of the art world have recently begun to adopt blockchain technology. This week, Christie’s famed auction house announced its very first auction of a pure NFT collection: “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, a digital artist whose NFT-based series of digital works has been sold for $ 3.5 million in December. Christie’s too confirmed with Bloomberg that he intends to accept Ether as payment for the main prize of the artwork (collectors will still have to use old-fashioned dollars to cover additional auction money).