Sotheby’s NFT has been concluded successfully. A man who was in a prison cell one year ago has now sold a photo NFT at Sothby’s for $250k USD.
Sotheby’s auction house is nearly three centuries old, but its top executives want to embrace the cutting edge of technology and all of its buzzwords – metaverse, NFT and crypto.
“The reason Sotheby’s has existed for 277 years isthate we have a history of embracing innovation and so the NFT is no different,” the firm’s US chief executive Charles Stewart told AFP in an interview.
He’s talking about non-fungible tokens, ubiquitous digital objects tied to art or other objects, some of which have sold for millions of dollars in antique auction houses over the past year.
And even better for Stewart’s business, he says there’s a lot of cross-pollination between the old and new art worlds.
“The same is true the other way around. (For) a lot of young technology investors – especially founders, entrepreneurs – NFTs have been a gateway into the wider arts market.”
By way of example, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun spent more than $70 million (about Rs 530 crore) at Sotheby’s last year for a work by Swiss-born artist Alberto Giacometti.
At a rival auction house, a collector of Christie’s paid a similar amount for an NFT by an American artist known as . Known as Beeple.
“The traditional art world has been hearing a lot about NFTs. Many people don’t understand this. Some have adopted it. But purely a curiosity,” he says at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Mere, an octagonal-shaped animation by New York-based artist Kevin McCoy, became the first work to be associated with an NFT-type certificate of ownership in May 2014, three years before the term NFT was coined.
An NFT is a digital object such as a drawing, animation, piece of music, photo or video with a certificate of authenticity created by blockchain technology. cryptocurrency. It cannot be forged or otherwise manipulated.
NFT exchanges take place in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin on specialist sites. Traditional auction houses are trying to capitalize on this phenomenon. The price of bitcoin in India at 11 am IST on 11th June was 26.8 lakhs.
The NFT currently generates several hundred million dollars in transactions every month.
The Cryptopunk 7523, created by the American company Larva Labs, has a pixelated face that is reminiscent of 1980s video game characters.
It has also become the second most expensive NFT ever after the artist’s digital artwork of Beeple’s Every Day, which Christie’s sold in March for $69.3 million (approximately Rs 500 crore).
After the surge in NFT sales between January and April, average prices and the number of purchases have slowed, leading some experts to speculate that the bubble may soon end.
