Digital Mona Lisas
So what kind of unique digital assets are people collecting? The answer is that pretty much anything can be an NFT, but let's start with digital art.
The best-known works of the NFT era don’t look like Renaissance paintings, but they’ve been selling for prices that rival those of old school canvases. Take the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple.
In 2007, Beeple started a project called Everydays. The goal was to create a new digital artwork every day and hone his skills along the way. He slowly developed the unique style for which he’s now known: surreal collages of presidents, celebrities, and pop-culture touchstones like Buzz Lightyear. Other pieces, like his image of a pixelated Mona Lisa, ironically reference his lack of conventional artistic training.
Beeple made history in 2019 by becoming the first artist to sell an NFT through Christie’s, a British auction house that’s long been a central node in the global art market. Beeple’s work, which featured images from the first 5,000 days of the Everydays project, sold for $69 million.
His aren’t the only digital artworks which are highly sought after. CryptoPunks, a limited edition run of 10,000 randomly generated pixelated punks, regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. A collection of 10,000 cartoon apes known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club sell for just as much. Famous collectors of the apes include Eminem, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton, and Serena Williams.
But it’s not just digital art that’s being sold via blockchain. Online culture is a treasure trove of potential collectibles. An NFT of one of the first Vine videos ever made sold for over $16,000. So is music. When the rock band Kings of Leon released an album as an NFT, it generated over $2 million in sales. Videos are another popular format. Collectors of highlight videos featuring famous moments in American basketball history have spent over half a billion dollars on NBA Top Shots NFTs.
NFTs are also changing the way digital work is funded. Selling tokens of ownership for essays, newsletters, or even tweets allows creators to monetize their work without putting it behind a paywall.
Another emerging trend is to combine NFTs with “social tokens” that give buyers special privileges. When you buy a Bored Ape, for example, you get access to a members-only community – think Soho House, but online. Other brands’ NFTs provide access to exclusive merchandise no one else can buy.
Add all that together and it’s easy to see why the NFT market is booming right now.
