Beeple's "Everydays: The First 500 days" piece sold for 69 million dollars at a Christie's auction.
Christie's.
The new format helped Christie's achieve its highest sales in five years, as the company capped off a milestone year with $150 million in token sales.
The auction house said this week that it is on track for $7.1 billion in total sales this year, up 22% from the previous year, which was before the coronaviruses outbreak. The first wave of the virus swept through the world.
Christie's gave some credit for the gain to NFTs, or digital representations of art, music, and other items. The company sold an NFT artwork for 69 million dollars in March. Beeple's digital piece is the most expensive work of digital art ever sold and marked the first time that Christie's has ever sold non-physical art.
Christie's has made a breakthrough in new sales formats and categories, including the new NFTS. They have allowed Christie's to showcase works by new emerging and under-represented artists and to reach out to a new audience of younger clients. 75% of buyers in the category were new to Christie's, and the average age of them was 42 years old.
In March, the British auction house became the first major one to sell an NFT, and since then it has sold more than 100 NFTs. It sold a set of nine NTFs for almost $17 million, more than it expected to sell them for. Beeple's sculpture "Human One" was sold by Christie's for nearly $29 million.
The NFT marketplace boomed this year as part of a surge in the broader cripto market, whose valuation was around $2.3 trillion on Tuesday, although lower than the $3 trillion it reached for the first time this year.
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