His division has never seen an online-only sale top $1 million before, he added. In the first 10 minutes of bidding we had more than a hundred bids from 21 bidders and we were at a million dollars," said Noah Davis, specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie's. Nonetheless, auction house Christie's has just launched its first-ever sale of digital art – a collage of 5,000 pictures, also by Beeple – which exists solely as an NFT.īids for the work have hit $3 million, with the sale due to close on March 11. Like many new niche investment areas, there is the risk of major losses if the hype dies down, while there could be prime opportunities for fraudsters in a market where many participants operate under pseudonyms. Investors caution, however, that while big money is flowing into NFTs, the market could represent a price bubble. "If you spend 10 hours a day on the computer, or eight hours a day in the digital realm, then art in the digital realm makes tonnes of sense - because it is the world," said OpenSea's co-founder Alex Atallah. Monthly sales were at $1.5 million a year ago. OpenSea, a marketplace for NFTs, said it has seen monthly sales volume grow to $86.3 million so far in February, as of Friday, from $8 million in January, citing blockchain data. The computer-generated video sold by Rodriguez-Fraile shows what appears to be a giant Donald Trump collapsed on the ground, his body covered in slogans, in an otherwise idyllic setting. "Non-fungible" refers to items that cannot be exchanged on a like-for-like basis, as each one is unique - in contrast to "fungible" assets like dollars, stocks or bars of gold.Įxamples of NFTs range from digital artworks and sports cards to pieces of land in virtual environments or exclusive use of a cryptocurrency wallet name, akin to the scramble for domain names in the early days of the internet. "The reality here is that this is very, very valuable because of who is behind it." "You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn't have any value because it doesn't have the provenance or the history of the work," said Rodriguez-Fraile, who said he first bought Beeple's piece because of his knowledge of the U.S.-based artist's work. Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.
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