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Indeed!
Vinny
We Now Know Who Paid $69.3 Million for a Digital Artwork—Sort Of
This whole story is getting even weirder.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/me ... ml?via=rss
After the gavel dropped and a piece of digital art sold for $69.3 million at a Christie’s auction on Thursday, one thing wasn’t clear: who had bought it. Now we know�sort of. The buyer is a mysterious figure known only as “Metakovan” who has been hovering around the cryptocurrency space for years.
Everydays: The First 5000 Days is a collage of 5,000 pictures that artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, started composing every day since 2007. Besides being the third-most-expensive piece of art ever sold by a living artist, the collage is notable because it is attached to a form of cryptocurrency called a non-fungible token, or NFT, and has no physical presence. In fact, the artwork itself is available for viewing free of charge across the internet. What Christie’s actually auctioned off is a one-of-a-kind cryptographic token that acts as a sort of certificate of ownership for the collage, which can in turn be sold to someone else in the future. The buyer also received a digital file of the art and some rights to display the image, but the copyright wasn’t part of the transaction, Christie’s told Slate. NFT’s are the latest cryptocurrency craze, in which celebrities like Grimes and Logan Paul are using the technology to sell digital keepsakes for millions of dollars.
Initial reports speculated that the winner of the Christie’s auction was Justin Sun, founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron who has been willing to spend huge sums of money on other virtual grails; he recently bid $2 million for an NFT attached to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet. However, Sun tweeted on Friday that he was outbid within 20 seconds of the auction closing by someone who had offered $250,000 more than his final $60 million bid. (There were around $9 million in fees added to the final bid.) Christie’s announced on Friday that Metakovan, who is a Singapore-based cryptocurrency investor, had actually won the collage.
“When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” Metakovan said of The First 5000 Days in a press release. “It represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.”