HOW MUCH?!?
The first NFT was minted in 2014 by entrepreneur Anil Dash, but it was only last year they truly took off. This was in large part thanks to the sale of an artwork by Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple.
Everydays: The first 5000 days is a collage of art and photos taken from each of the 5,000 days of his life, and last March was sold by auction house Christie’s for $69.4 million. The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan, who is, of course, an NFT entrepreneur.
In fact, the start of 2021 was particularly lucrative for Beeple, as he also sold two of the other most expensive NFTs to date: a piece called Crossroads and another called Ocean Front, for a paltry $6.6 million and $6 million respectively.
Beeple’s record sale held until last December, when a mysterious digital artist called Pak sold an NFT of a work called The Merge for $91.8 million. It depicts three white spheres on a black background. The buyer was not one individual. A consortium took advantage of the structure of NFTs and instead the work was sold to 28,983 buyers, who each bought an NFT representing their share.
Other high-profile sales include a copy of the original “Doge” meme, which features the now famous Shiba Inu dog, which sold for $4.4 million, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose self-portrait of sorts sold for $5.4 million.
Similarly, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey sold an NFT of his first ever tweet for $2.9 million. And even World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has got in on the act, auctioning off an NFT depicting a few lines of source code from his creation for $5.4 million.