- Over $80 million in crypto art has been sold, with no end in sight to the boom.
- Popular artists include Beeple and Pak. Their artworks can fetch up to $777,000 each.
- The number of marketplaces is also growing, and Gemini’s Nifty Gateway is leading the pack.
According to data from Cryptoart.com, January’s volume, alone, is approaching $12 million, and—judging by current trends—that’s likely to be surpassed in February, with the prices being paid reflecting skyrocketing demand.
Crypto art relies on non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which are usually issued with an Ethereum token, ERC-721. This ensures verifiable digital scarcity; each artwork is a uniquely distinguishable digital asset—no two are the same.
The most expensive artwork to date is “THE COMPLETE MF COLLECTION,” of 20 artworks by Beeple. The digital artist and graphic designer makes video content and concert visuals for Nicki Minaj and Eminem. He is also currently the most popular crypto artist.
His MF Collection work was sold for $777,777 in December 2020, on the Gemini crypto exchange marketplace Nifty Gateway, to Tim Kang—who goes by the pseudonym “Illestrater.” It’s viewable on cryptoart.com, which features live data on all the most popular artists.
Beeple (real name, Mike Winkelman) has sold 824 works, with a total value of almost $7 million.
“I’m honestly just trying to make the fucking dopest thing that people will pay the most for,” the artist told Decrypt in December.
Nifty Gateway is the current marketplace leader in sales volume. Its biggest selling points are its regular NFT airdrops, and the fact that it allows the artworks to be purchased with fiat.
The second best-selling artist is Pak, who’s not far behind Beeple. Pak has sold 1,630 artworks, with a total value of $5.2 million. Pak’s highest sale was for “Base,” which went for $166,267.
At least part of the appeal is down to the mystery that surrounds the pseudo-anonymous artist, who may not even be a real person but a collective or even an AI constructed by a team of engineers.
In third place is Trevor Jones, a traditional and crypto artist from Edinburgh, Scotland. His biggest sale (and the all-time, second-largest sale) was a collaboration with another comic book and crypto artist, José Delbo.
Jones wrote that he applied and photographed consecutive images that “could then be layered like brush strokes” over Delbo’s original drawing. The aim was to give the “impression that this was one continuous artwork from pencil, to ink, to completed painting.”The batman figure which emerges allows the viewer to see the artist at work, but, in the end, “only the bat escapes.”
The work sold to a collector named “maxstealth’ for $499,197 on MakersPlace.
NFT platforms are proliferating
As well as MakersPlace and Nifty Gateway there are now almost 50 different platforms for creating and selling digital art.