Detail taken from a collage “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”, by a digital artist BEEPLE, which is being auctioned at Christie’s, an unknown location, in this undated handout obtained by Reuters.
Beeple | Pictures by Christie Ltd. | via Reuters
The buyer of the non-fungible token Beeple for $ 69 million is a cryptocurrency that goes by the alias Metakovan.
Metakovan’s real identity is not known, but the investor is the co-founder of the NFT collection called Metapurse, which collects NFTs to display in the metaverse through virtual museums. Metakovan already owns the largest collection of Beeples and split the ownership of a collection of Beeples with a special token called the B.20 coin.
CNBC spoke to Metakovan’s partner on Metapurse, which goes by the name of Twobadour, who said that the NFT is “the most valuable job of its generation”.
Twobadour said he does not know his exact plans for this job, but options include splitting it up or offering it as a new token. He said the goal is not to make money, but to decentralize and democratize art so that chip holders everywhere can share a piece of history and share the wealth.
For example, it is as if people can go to the Museum of Modern Art and actually own some of the works, he said.
“We made history and created a god” in Beeple, he said.
The ad 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. The NFTs market – which could be any digital asset whose ownership is registered on a blockchain – it has exploded in recent weeks to more than $ 400 million, with a vast new army of young collectors paying record prices for everything from videos with NBA highlights to memes of cats and art.
For his $ 69 million, Metakovan will receive “essentially a long series of numbers and letters,” according to Noah Davis, an art expert at Christie’s. “It is a code that exists in the Ethereum block chain. It is a block in the chain that will be placed in your Ethereum wallet.” The buyer also gets “a gigantic JPEG,” said Davis.
The sale reached the limit of two weeks of frantic online bids and ushered in a new era in collectibles, where prices for blockchain-based digital images now rival the prices paid by Picassos 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 speculative fashion, Beeple’s eight-digit price has made the art world suddenly realize .
Shortly after the auction result, Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, tweeted: “holy f —” On Thursday night, he also tweeted the image of a “Mona Lisa” scanned with the caption: “THE NEXT CHAPTER “.
The record work, called “The first 5,000 days”, was the first to be sold at a large auction house.
In 2007, Winkelmann decided to post a new digital work of art every day for the rest of his life and did not miss a single day. The first 5,000 of these works, which he calls “Everyday”, were compiled to form “The first 5,000 days”.