Record-Breaking Sale of Beeple NFT At Christie’s A “Watershed Moment”

The first ever digital only artwork at Christie’s closed yesterday for a staggering $69m. This record breaking auction comes as no surprise following the recent explosion around non-fungible tokens or NFTs.

NFTs has been around since the mid-2010s but hit the mainstream in late 2017 with CryptoKitties, a blockchain game on Ethereum developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats. Art was an early use case for NFTs, and blockchain technology in general, because of the purported ability of NFTs to provide proof of authenticity and ownership of digital art, a medium that was designed for ease of mass reproduction, and unauthorized distribution through the Internet.

According to the NFT Report 2020, the value of the NFT market grew by 299 percent in 2020, when it was valued at over $250 million. But the first few months of 2021 have already seen astonishing sales, even before this auction.

For Justin Banon, CEO and Co-founder of Boson Protocol, the project pioneering a capture resistant dCommerce ecosystem using NFTs encoded with game theory, the exploding virtual market is indicative of what is happening in the larger blockchain space. He believes NFTs will revolutionize much more than just the art world:

“We must recognize the record-breaking sale of Beeple’s opus as what it is: a watershed moment for our industry,” Banon said. “This sale will allow the public to see the capabilities of NFTs in the art space, however, it is just the beginning of the NFT revolution, which will ultimately change the way we live. That might sound like a big statement – because it is. NFTs are fueling the rise of decentralized commerce, which give power back to the people. NFTs remove the need for arbitration in the fulfilment of digital to physical redemption, and their recognition in this sale marks a giant leap for the ecosystem that will reverberate across all digital technologies. This is just the beginning.”

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