Christie’s crypto art sale hits $1m within minutes

World-renowned auction house Christie’s and artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, made non-fungible token (NFT) history last Thursday when the house launched its first-ever auction of an NFT without any accompanying physical artwork. Bidding has already skyrocketed to over $1.8 million.

This collection of works is titled “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”. It’s been described as an accumulative piece made up of 5,000 images – one for each day over the past 13 years.

NFTs are unique digital assets like art or in-game items, typically held on the Ethereum blockchain. The asset consists of an encrypted image or video file, accompanied by a digital signature that can’t be duplicated, giving the buyer assurance their purchase is authentic.

The auction followed Beeple’s sale of another piece for a whopping $6.6 million on Monday via Nifty Gateway, a crypto marketplace for digital art. According to Crypto Art, Beeple is currently the top-earning crypto artist in the world, earning $20.2 million of total sales to date from 824 pieces of digital art. And the industry’s not slowing anytime soon – at the time of writing, the total value of the crypto art market reached a record $181 million, with over 95,000 artworks sold.