The world’s largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewelry, and real estate, Sotheby created history by auctioning an NFT art for a record-breaking sum. Sotheby successfully carried out the sale of rare artwork, ‘Crypto punk.’ The luxury auction house held a virtual auction from 3rd June to 10th June with 27 unique digital arts.
The artwork, ‘Crypto Punk,’ also called ‘Covid Alien’, was sold in its London salesroom for nearly $11.8 million. CryptoPunk was released in June 2017 as one of the first Non-Fungible Tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. They are 24*24-pixel art images, which are generated algorithmically. There are almost 10,000 small, 8-bit style punks and all of them have unique features.
The sold artwork Covid Alien was part of an auction titled ‘Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale,’ it featured an alien with blue-green skin, wearing a medical mask. The artwork is reported to be bought by an Israeli entrepreneur Shalom Meckenize, the largest shareholder of a digital sports company.
Sotheby’s officials believe the sale marks an auction record for a single CryptoPunk. The other NFTs sold during the auction were Kevin McCoy’s Quantum ($1.5 million) and Robert Alice’s iNFT (`~$500K).
NFT’s Are Not Dead, Still Alive!
The NFT’s gained immense popularity in the first quarter of 2021, wherein the first sale fetched $69.3 million. Sotheby’s first NFT auction was also held in April, where it sold an artwork known as ‘Pak’ for $16.8 million.
Before the sale of Covid Alien for $11.8 million, NFT’s were believed to losing traction globally, with their sales plummeting by an astounding 90% in the first week of June this year. Moreover, the active NFT wallets had also declined nearly 70%, from 12,000 per day to 3,900 per day. As the study was conducted in the first week of June, it was speculated that the NFT bubble might have lasted only during the first four months of 2021 and it finally popped in May.
However, the sale of CryptoPunk for 4520 ETH proves that the NFT segment is here to stay. The NFT collector and previous owner of Covid Alien ‘Sillytuna’ also hinted about purchasing another artwork using these funds. It shows that the interest in NFTs is still high, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.