What NFT is worth the most?
In the past years, you saw crazy news about NFTs everywhere and how people make a fortune with buying and selling them. If you visit opensea.io in order to see what NFTs are for sale, you might stumble upon a “CryptoDickbutt” image for 1400$. Yes, these are NFTs…
If these prices are justified or not is a different discussion. The fact is that people are willing to pay these sums and therefore the market is there.
But which NFT is actually the most valuable? Not all NFTs are the same and one might argue that artistic finesse and complexity might make NFTs actually special but this still needs to be proven. But let’s have a look at those NFTs which are today’s record holders for the most expensive NFTs ever.
Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, sold an NFT named “Everydays” for $69.3 million in spring 2021. The NFT is a JPEG with about 21000x21000 pixels. One might expect the most amazing JPEG of all time for a price of slightly less than $70 million. It is, in reality, a composite of 5000 distinct artworks created by Winkelmann for his “Everydays” series. So it is an intricate work of art, but if you take a closer look at the individual elements, you might be surprised.
Beeple’s website allows you to explore his individual works in depth if you want to find out how the tiles of the collage look like in detail. Many of his pieces are “controversial,” or at the least far away from political correctness. Between May 1st, 2007, through January 7th, 2021, Beeple created a new image every day, and many of the graphics were influenced by current events.
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No matter what I think of Beeple’s work, his biggest admirer appears to be Vignesh Sundaresan, who spent 42,329 Ether, which was roughly $70 million at that time, for this collage at auction. But that’s not the end of the story. The artist and the buyer knew each other through another project, which brings an interesting twist to this story.
At that time, Sundaresan was working on the new B20 token. This is a cryptocurrency, built on Beeple’s other NFTs and whose value increased dramatically after the auction, owing to Beeple’s sudden fame, thus both Beeple and Sundaresan, gained financially.
I don’t think that this event was proven to be fraudulent. And maybe Sundaresan actually is such a big fan of Beeple that he needs to buy all of his work, no matter the cost. But having your business partner driving up the price of your auction while holding assets, tied to the value of this art piece looks pretty suspicious.
So Beeple’s 70 million euro NFT will be remembered not just as one of the most lucrative NFT sales ever, but also as a suspected marketing campaign or maybe even a gigantic fraud if the sale was only a ruse to entice people to spend large sums in Beeple’s other projects. But, as far as I know, that has yet to be proven.
Even though the 70 million USD, paid for “Everydays” was the highest sum ever paid for an NFT, it is not the most expensive NFT ever produced. Pak, who is either an artist or a group, created a project called “The Merge” and this one generated 92 million USD in sales. It was not bought by one person but by approximately 30.000 collectors who each bought individual pieces of “The Merge”.
This thing is indeed something special. The Merge produced 312,686 unique NFTs. Each of these NFTs represents a single unit of mass. The NFT’s smart contract operates differently from other NFTs. In most cases, the NFT contract does little more than trade the owners of money and NFT to settle the purchase. However, The Mass’s smart contract considers if you already have a mass NFT in your wallet since purchasing a second mass NFT unites the two unique NFTs into a common more valuable NFT. They will be “merged”! As a result, the individual components of The Merge become increasingly scarce and more precious.
The Merge is represented graphically by a black backdrop with white spheres, with each sphere representing a mass NFT. When two NFTs combine to become one, the matching sphere expands. They have “a larger mass,” so to speak.
It appears to be a game in which the aim is to buy and swallow as many other spheres as possible in order to develop a larger sphere than the other players. The Merge’s biggest sphere is even called “Alpha Mass”.
Pak was able to build an intriguing game in which individuals invested hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dollars, and he/she/they was/were able to collect about 92 million USD.
If you’re wondering what NFT actually stands for, have a look at my quick introduction. I believe that NFTs and smart contracts will play a very important role in the future of the internet, even though today we are using them in a weird way.
Follow me if you want to learn more about the basics of crypto, the potential of blockchain-based technologies and what actually happens on the crypto market! And leave me a comment if you have questions or remarks.
Stay awesome!
