NFTs
This NFT Was Sold For $69 Million (2021)!
The Ephemeral Hype Of NFT JPEGs And The Future Of This Technology
Pet rocks. This was the hype in the 70s (for about a year), yet, as with every hype, a vast feeling of emptiness (and a lightened wallet) is the outcome.
The comparison of NFTs with pet rocks perfectly describes the short-lived NFT hype that turned into mania at the peak of its publicity.
NFTs were everywhere, and everyone was starting several collections, solely aiming to take advantage of the situation and profit excessively from the craze.
As with every other craze, NFTs lost interest, and prices (even the top collections) collapsed.
We revisit the main event of the NFTs hype, Beeple’s incredible auction that made him more than $69 million, and examine the odds of NFTs re-surfacing, perhaps under a different format, that this time will contain utility instead of ugly illustration of monkeys.
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The Beeple’s NFT artwork That Sold for $69.3 million!
“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is a digital artwork created by artist Beeple (real name: Mike Winkelmann) that was auctioned at Christie’s on March 11th, 2021, achieving a final bid of $69,346,250.
More than 69 million dollars were spent on a single piece of digital art, tokenized under Ethereum’s NFTs protocols.
This piece of art was not a tokenized representation of a physical item but a digital image hosted on the cloud servers of Amazon, and its details permanently recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.
Beeple’s NFT created history by becoming the first-ever digitized artwork to be auctioned by Christie’s, although it also came at an exorbitant price.
The NFT auction was online and Beeple recorded his reaction during the auction in this video clip:
The digital art in this NFT token is called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, and the price paid in this auction is the third largest ever paid for a work of art of a living artist.
For the past thirteen years, Beeple has been creating digital art on a daily basis. The NFT auctioned by Christie’s represents a collection of the first five thousand digital artworks by Beeple.
Details of the token according to Christie’s website:
NFTs are tokens stored in tamper-proof blockchains like Ethereum.
The smart contract details for Beeple’s NFT are here:
- token ID: 40913
- wallet address: 0xc6b0562605D35eE710138402B878ffe6F2E23807
- smart contract address: 0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756
Beeple couldn’t believe what was happening and reacted by expressing his surprise on Twitter:
Beeple is a revolutionary artist who has given fresh air to digital art, and this auction was the beginning of a process that brought NFTs to the mainstream, and a modern era of artistic brilliance recorded in blockchain.
However, there is also a dark side to NFTs since flaws and scams always emerge in the digital realm.
In addition, some uses of NFTs appear to be of limited practical value.
Jack Dorsey tokenized in NFT format his first Tweet and sold for a staggering $2.9 million. That’s an NFT that is now worth less than $4!
And what happens if you buy someone’s tweet and they delete it?
It is controversial to see tweets selling for millions of dollars, and there is a lot of criticism if tokenizing posts offer an actual use case.
NFTs were a hot topic, but as all blockchains were filled with millions of jpegs and demand was shrinking, the NFT market eventually lost its appeal.
Ethereum is the main platform for artists and other creators, but the focus later shifted to every other platform supporting smart contracts, as Ethereum had reached a point where it couldn’t serve mass adoption, being congested with high fees. Fees had reached $200 on several occasions, making Ethereum impractical.
Will NFTs Ever Return?
We can presume that NFTs will return, but we should also hope not in the format of the hysteria over overpriced jpeg images.
NFTs contain utility and already find practical use cases in various fields:
- Ticketing
- Gaming
- Music
- Digital Identity & Identity Verification
- Digital Ownership
- Intellectual Property
- Brand Identity
- The Metaverse
Despite all the practical applications, we should expect the collectible factor to rise again in the coming years.
The foundation has been set, and there seems to be no decline in the enthusiasm for the most popular NFT collections. The NFT community is gearing up for a resurgence, hoping to relive the 2021 hype.
VCs have returned in some blockchains like Solana, while other top blockchains (like Bitcoin Cash with CashTokens) have enhanced their smart contract capabilities offering a wide range of new tools.
