Time.news – A sale of digital works byartist Pak with the “Nft” brand, named after the new authentication technology, it reached $ 16.8 million, a success for the Sotheby’s auction house, which had organized the event.
One month after the sale of ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ by digital artist Beeple, for $ 69.3 million at Christie’s, rival Sotheby’s has embarked on the adventure ‘Nft’ for the first time. Acronym which stands for ‘Non-Fungible Token’, the cryptographic tokens on a blockchain that constitute unique, non-interchangeable, unalterable information, which allow the buyer of a digital object (drawing, animation, video, photo, music) to be sure of being the owner.
For its premiere, Sotheby’s had chosen a completely different format from that of Christie’s. Rather than playing on scarcity, has put up for sale in unlimited quantities, through the specialized Nifty Gateway platform, “cubes”, created by Pak. Approximately 23,598 of these animations of a rotating rectangular parallelepiped found buyers during the three-day sales, totaling $ 14 million.
The artist’s idea was to question the notions of value and rarity by not limiting the number of pieces sold. According to Sotheby’s, about 3,080 collectors bought at least one cube. In addition to these cubes, Pak also donated two unique works, one of which representing a single pixel was purchased for $ 1.36 million by digital collector Eric Young. The other, a rotating geometric shape, sold for $ 1.44 million. Those who bought more cubes received another unique work, entitled ‘The Cube’, a sort of bonus, different from the other “cubes”.
The maxi-sale testifies to the vitality of the “Nft” market, which generates, every day, more than 10 million dollars of transactions on digital platforms such as Nifty Gateway or OpenSea. According to the specialized site NonFungible.com, two billion dollars changed hands in this market, in the first quarter of 2021 alone.
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