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In October 2020, Christie’s-the venerable auction house-sold a physical canvas by the artist Robert Alice that quietly came with an NFT, Christie’s first shot at the crypto market the lot was estimated to sell for $12,000 but traded for more than $130,000. Hackatao, an artist duo who formed in Milan in 2007, sold $250,000 worth of NFTs last year on SuperRare. Dan Kelly of the industry publication, which tracks sales of NFTs, estimates the crypto art market to be at more than $20 million, which isn’t massive until you realize that most of that trading happened in the last twelve months. Or maybe NFTs are just the next Beanie Babies. “This is one of the things, in retrospect, where people will say: How did we miss this?” “We all felt like we were witnessing history,” he says. Cock Foster had been monitoring the proceedings from his apartment in New York’s Chinatown and was stunned-by the total figures but also by what this drop meant for the crypto scene. But when they crushed that number on Friday night, things started to get interesting. (Most marketplaces required users to have Ethereum wallets.) For the December auction of Beeple’s work, they’d hoped to generate $500,000 in sales for the weekend. But blockchain makes it collectible.ĭuncan Cock Foster-that’s seriously the family name-and his brother had launched Nifty Gateway with the hope of mainstreaming the market for NFTs, which had been complicated to buy and sell. Put another way: Anyone can view a Beeple on Instagram. “There was no scarcity in ones and zeroes until you enter with the blockchain.” “Physicality is a bug, not a feature,” says Tyler. The fact that you can’t hang the art on the wall is beside the point, they contend. Pretty quickly, his brother, a former electrical engineer for Boeing, was scrawling sales figures on a whiteboard while the kids ran around the firepit, oblivious to the fact that every half hour another piece of Beeple’s digital art was selling for more than $100,000.

That Saturday afternoon, Winkelmann-who looks like a young Bill Gates dressed in Steve Kornacki cosplay and speaks with a Wisconsin accent straight out of an old SNL sketch-and his wife, Jen, went to his brother’s backyard to monitor the auction. And in the weird worlds of high fashion, fine art, and cryptocurrency, it doesn’t get any weirder than this story.Įxpectations for December’s auction were on the high side of earthbound.

YOINK BEEPLE DRIVER

That money? It went to one Mike Winkelmann, thirty-nine, father of two, husband of a schoolteacher, resident of a Charleston, South Carolina, suburb, driver of a “fucking Toyota Corolla piece of shit.”

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