Nyan Cat is turning 10 in April (already feeling old?), And to celebrate the birthday of one of the healthiest memes on the internet, the artist behind the gif, Chris Torres, recently put a remastered version at auction. On Friday, the piece was sold for 300 Ether on the Foundation cryptocurrency platform, which translates to about $ 587,000 based on the value of the cryptocurrency at the time of publication.
In an interview with The Verge, Torres said he never plans to sell another original image file of Nyan Cat, which means that the patron of this gif now owns a truly unique piece.
“I think it is cool to know that you have the only piece that exists,” he told the outlet. “And I feel like Nyan Cat will be really special.”
Torres made a series of adjustments and changes to the gif for almost a decade, which included enlarging the gif and making minor touches to the art to correct details that had bothered him over the years. For example, a particular star would appear and disappear randomly in the original 12-frame animation, so he took the opportunity to remove it entirely. Torres told The Verge that he thought the remastered version “did very well this time”.
If your eyebrows went up at that price of several thousand dollars, you should know that the crypto market is going through a hell of a time. Several online platforms have emerged in recent years, such as SuperRare, Zora and Nifty Gateway, where artists and customers exchange digital works worth thousands of dollars in the real world. Foundation is one of the newest faces on the scene, having been released just two weeks ago, but has already registered $ 410 in sales, according to Verge.
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These cryptography platforms generally sell works through “non-fungible tokens” or NFTs, blockchain-based digital tokens that represent unique assets. Since NFTs are not divisible and there are no two alike, their ownership can be verified and tracked via the blockchain. Although it should be noted that on many cryptographic art platforms, actual sales, such as that of the new and improved Gif Nyan Cat, are made with Ether, a cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is second only to Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization and volume, according to Reuters.
The cryptography community has been talking about NFTs for a while, but traditional branches of the art world have only recently begun to embrace blockchain technology. This week, Famous Christie auction house announced its first auction of a purely NFT-based collection: “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, a digital artist whose series of NFT-based digital works was sold by $ 3.5 million in December. Christie’s too confirmed with Bloomberg who plans to accept Ether as payment for the main price of the artwork (collectors will still have to use old dollars to cover any additional auction house fees).