Acclaimed NFT Artist's Blockchain-Backed Digital Art Auction Raises $3.5 Million

Blockchain-backed digital art is continuing to make waves and this week an artist who calls himself ‘Beeple’ raised $3.5 million during his latest non-fungible token (NFT) art collection auction. The “Everydays” collection auction included 21 original single edition Beeple pieces, a 100 piece series, and three open edition variations sold in five-minutes.

During the first week of November, news.Bitcoin.com reported on a piece of blockchain-backed election art that sold for $66,666, and the animated piece changes after the official U.S. Electoral College decision. That artwork was created by Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as ‘Beeple,’ and his non-fungible token (NFT) art collections have been extremely popular.

This week, Beeple raised a whopping $3.5 million in a NFT auction that sold his collection of art dubbed the “Everydays” collection.

One of Beeple’s pieces had an auction that raised $777,777 for the art and the bid was entered with only a second left to spare according to the NFT online auction house Nifty Gateway. After that sale and all the art was sold, Nifty Gateway’s official Twitter account tweeted about the milestone auctions gathering over $3.5 million in ether.

“And that’s all she wrote,” Nifty Gateway tweeted. “The auction ends on a ridiculous last-second bid of $777,777. This brings total primary market sales from Beeple’s collection to over $3,500,000+,” the Twitter account added.

Winkelmann or Beeple, previously worked for well-known companies like Louis Vuitton, Nike, and celebrities such as Katy Perry and Justin Bieber before jumping into the NFT space. According to his website, the “Everydays” collection is something he has been working on since 2002.

“These pictures are all done from start to finish every day,” Beeple’s web portal details. “The purpose of this project is to help me get better at different things. By posting the results online, I’m ‘less’ likely to throw down a big pile of ass-shit even though most of the time I still do because I suck ass,” the artist added.

Some of the most valuable pieces sold on Nifty Gateway this past weekend featured subjects like Star Wars, Tom Hanks versus the coronavirus, and one dubbed “Mario 2020.” Beeple now joins the ranks of the NFT artists who have made large sums of ethereum (ETH) for their art.

For instance, the NFT piece called Forever Rose was purchased by collectors for $1 million. Further a piece of NFT art from the Robert Alice art project called “Block 21 (42.36433° N, -71.26189° E) (from Portraits of a Mind)” sold at the leading auction house Christie’s in October.

Many other artists have been flocking from the traditional art space to the world of blockchain-backed art. The acclaimed comic book illustrator Jose Delbo has been selling NFTs and the popular 4K digital video artist Terry Flaxton has also joined the movement. A Scotland-based NFT artist, Trevor Jones, has sold work for $55k (“Picasso’s Bull”) and $111k (“Genesis”) as well.

The web portal nonfungible.com, which measures the NFT market history and statistics shows there have been 5,094,912 NFT sales to-date worth over $146 million. The average price across the aggregate of $146 million worth of NFT sales is $28.84 per NFT on December 15, 2020. Beeple’s “Everydays” collection for 2020 hosted on Nifty Gateway can be viewed here.