A recent unusual art auction showcases the new power of the market in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to facilitate the buying and selling of digital assets, potentially, for lots of money.
Reuters reports a 10-second video clip bought in October of last year for $67,000 has now resold last week for $6.6 million.
Art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile reportedly bought the artwork, which is authenticated with an NFT identifier, from an artist with the nom de guerre of “Beeple”.
Unsurprisingly, for those with a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, the subject of the video was a fallen Donald Trump with different words flashing around him.
Non-fungible tokens are examples of technology authentication that create verified chains for some digital object. In other words, they provide proof of ownership for a particular piece of digital art. Most of us are familiar with the ability to simply copy/paste images and videos across the Internet, but NFT technology provides that core marker that allows someone to own one of these multimedia pieces.
“If you spend 10 hours a day on the computer, or eight hours a day in the digital realm, then art in the digital realm makes tonnes of sense – because it is the world,” explains OpenSea’s co-founder Alex Atallah; the OpenSea platform has recently seen NFT sales skyrocket to the tune of 1000% or more.
Renowned auction venue Christie’s is also seeing NFTs selling for big amounts of money, according to the Reuters piece.
“We are in a very unknown territory. In the first 10 minutes of bidding we had more than a hundred bids from 21 bidders and we were at a million dollars,” said Noah Davis, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art there, of recent NFT popularity.
Recent big sellers in the NFT world include Nayan Cat, which sold for $603,000 and various pieces by Cryptopunk.
The move toward verified valuation of digital assets as a new market has been building for years, but now, with these portable and muscular technologies, we could see this business really take off. Watch the impact on markets.
