The leading NFT Marketplace, Christie’s, has announced that it will auction nine CryptoPunks (NFTs attached to small, pixelated images) in a single sale. Christie’s, a popular auction house, has been participating actively in NFT sales since late last year. The $69 million record NFT sale by Beeple was conducted on Christie’s platform.
Christie’s is hoping to break another record as it has concluded to auction off nine CryptoPunks, which are extremely expensive NFTs linked to small digital portraits. CryptoPunks refers to a series of 10,000 unique portraits stored by Larva Labs development studio with every one of the images linked to an NFT, a non-fungible token.
Some CryptoPunks have risen to as high as $7 million
NFTs refer to unique collectibles that are crypto protected and connected to a file to sell as proof of possession. In October 2020, Christie’s auctioned off its first-ever NFT, together with its respective tangible artwork. In March, Beeple made history selling the highest-priced NFT ever auctioned, although it is still less than the money generated from the combined sales of CryptoPunks.
The prices of Ethereum CryptoPunks have soared to record levels. A single pixelated pic of a male “punk” was worth 78 ETH, an equivalent of $136,000 yesterday, based on the information released by CryptoPunks, an Ethereum-based digital app for artworks. The NFT concept is a sort of discriminatory initiative in the world of arts.
While its supporters see it as a positive development that empowers artists by giving them the revenue earned from the secondary market, others see it as a mere ruse that can devastate the ecology and a platform for hyping mere images. According to a tweet by Mat Dryhurst, an NFT critic, based on the conversation he has had with experts, the NFT is nothing but selling and buying jpegs. He terms it as a “Narrative failure.”
How Christie’s auctioned its first NFT artwork
In October 2020, a seller sold a digital image of Bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto for $131,250 on the Christie’s platform, breaking the NFT sales record and making it the first NFT sale at a prominent auction house. The NFT product was a digital portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin inventor. The artwork was created by Ben Gentilli, a digital artist but linked to the Robert Alice work.
The portrait is part of a complete project entitled ‘Portraits of Mind,’with a collection of 40 different objects. The portrait was designed to illustrate Satoshi Nakamoto. The layers that pass across the code to each surface of the panels created a sort of crosshairs having the main darkness pointing to the obscurity of the Bitcoin inventor. Gentilli described Bitcoin’s unique codebase as a historical artifact, hence his decision to immortalize it and conserve it in a fashion similar to how documents and artifacts are preserved.
Meanwhile, adverts shared online show that on May 13, nine CryptoPunks will be collectively sold on auction at the 21st Century Evening Sale. But if the prices of the CryptoPunks that will be sold at the auction are beyond your budget, alternative CryptoPunks will be available on Miami billboards soon, which will be launched as a public artwork tagged Pixelated.
