A sale of digital works by artist Pak stamped "NFT", named after the hot new authentication technology, reached $ 16.8 million, a hit for Sotheby's, which hosted the event. .
One month after the sale of
Everydays: The First 5000 Days
by digital artist Beeple, for $ 69.3 million at Christie's, its rival Sotheby's embarked, for the first time, in the “NFT” adventure.
Read also: Millionaire Vignesh Sundaresan reveals being the buyer of the Beeple sold for 60 million euros
These three letters designate non-fungible tokens, or “non-fungible tokens”, certificates of authenticity deemed inviolable, which allow the purchaser of a digital object (drawing, animation, video, photo, music) to be certain to be the owner.
For its premiere, Sotheby's had chosen a completely different format from that of Christie's.
Rather than playing on scarcity, he put on sale in unlimited quantities, via the specialized platform Nifty Gateway, “cubes” created by Pak.
Question notions of value
Some 23,598 of these animations of a rotating rectangular parallelepiped found buyers over the three days of the sale, for a total of $ 14 million.
The artist's idea was to question the notions of value and rarity by not limiting the number of pieces sold.
Some 3,080 collectors have purchased at least one cube, according to Sotheby's.
The artist also donated two unique works, one of which, depicting a single pixel, was acquired for $ 1.36 million by digital collector Eric Young.
The other, a rotating geometric shape, sold for $ 1.44 million.
The person who acquired the most cubes was to receive an additional unique work, entitled
The Cube
, a sort of bonus, different from the other works.
This sale testifies to the vitality of the “NFT” market, which generates more than ten million dollars in transactions daily on digital platforms such as Nifty Gateway or OpenSea.
According to the specialized site NonFungible.com, two billion dollars changed hands in this market, in the first quarter of 2021 alone.
To read also: "NFT": The new global fever of digital collectables
