Exactly one year has passed since the record sale for $69 million of the NFT minted by the artist Beeple. That auction at Christie’s marked a point of no return and established the NFT industry as the latest trend in the crypto world. 

Beeple’s $69 million NFT

The work was called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”. The work was the first NFT auctioned by the famous Christie’s house. It is a collage of works by Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, published for 5,000 consecutive days starting on 1 May 2007. 

Each work tells the story of Beeple’s evolution and becomes increasingly abstract, grotesque and absurd.  

In the NFT, all the works are collected in a single lot, which thus sold for $69.3 million. 

One year on

What has changed a year after that record sale? That episode opened a crack in the world of digital art and made it clear that collectors were willing to go crazy even for works in digital format, whose uniqueness is certified by the blockchain. 

A year later, Beeple’s record was broken by another sale, Pak‘s The Merge, which sold for $91.8m.  

In the meantime, the industry has been grinding out record numbers: 41 billion volumes in 2021 alone with a peak of over 1 billion being recorded on 22 August 2021. 

In 2022, the trend seems to be changing and NFTs are experiencing a decline in sales. 

Nevertheless, new marketplaces and collections are emerging all the time. 

Not only that, great artists have entered the sector, major fashion brands have launched their NFT collections (most recently Diesel), while the combination of sport and NFTs is getting closer and closer with projects such as Sorare. 

The most popular collections 

Today we know that collections of pixellated faces like the CryptoPunks, or monkeys like the Bored Ape Yacht Club can be worth millions of dollars. 

For example, CryptoPunk 5822 sold for 8,000 ETH or $23.7 million on 12 February. 

These are staggering numbers that do not fear a crisis. Especially since this market will be accompanied by the progressive development of metaverse where NFTs will play their part. 

Games such as Decentraland or The Sandbox have been precursors and experiments. But more and more brands are exploring metaverse and NFT, and it is easy to assume that the development of the sector may only be at the beginning. 

 

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