CryptoPunks NFT Portraits Sell for $16.9 Million at Christie s Auction
CryptoPunks is one of the earliest NFT projects created in 2017 by Larva Labs and they have since gained a lot of traction as collector’s items. By Edited by Gadgets 360 Newsdesk | Updated: 12 May 2021 16:20 IST
Photo Credit: Christie’s/ Larva Labs
CryptoPunk characters sold include one with rare attributes: blue face with glasses and the only alien
Highlights
The CryptoPunks NFT collection sold has 9 characters
It was part of 10,000 small-pixel portraits created by Larva Labs
A set of nine small pixel-art portraits out of a vault of 10,000 uniquely generated characters of people, zombies, and aliens, collectively called CryptoPunks, has sold for a massive $16.9 million (roughly Rs. 124.2 crores). This is said to be the second-largest non-fungible token (NFT) purchase after digital artist Beeple sold a jpeg image for $69 million (roughly Rs. 506.6 crores) in a simila
The work will be sold at Christie s on May 14.
April 23, 2021
The NFT comes with an image of the model before a work depicting her by Richard Prince. Photo courtesy of Emily Ratajkowski and Christie s Images Ltd 2021.
Supermodel and art-world regular Emily Ratajkowski is following in the footsteps of Kate Moss, Paris Hilton, and other celebrities by getting into the NFT game.
But unlike the others, Ratajkowski has a specific purpose: to reclaim authority over her image.
Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution, as Ratajkowski’s NFT is called, will hit the auction block at Christie’s on May 14 in a contemporary art day sale.
Yet this shrill outcry fails to acknowledge that even the markedly lower numbers still represent a
10-fold increase from six month ago. And though trading volume has drifted down from 40,000 to 20,000 transactions per week in the same period, it still stands well above levels only a short time ago.
Will prices vacillate? Of course they will! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the value of good art, digital or otherwise, will never drop but in the interim, the prices just might. Regarding the overall crypto market, what is indubitable is the wildly volatile price gyrations so vast, erratic, and swift that peaks and troughs are conflated into cycles lasting a single afternoon before the violent whipsaws happen all over again.