Beeple’s NFT Art Breaks Records With $69.3M Price Tag

A digital artwork created by crypto artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, has set a new record for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) after selling for $69.3 million on Christie’s auction house.

Titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, the NFT art piece is a digital collage comprised of 5,000 unique images created over a 14 years period. It was first minted on 16 February, and put up for auction on 25 February for only $100. With its final price tag of $69,346,250, “Everydays” has put Beeple in third place among the most expensive artworks by living artists, with the other two being David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

Beeple’s NFT was the first digital art piece to be created exclusively for the Christie auction house, which sold its first NFT artwork — called “Block 21” — in October 2020. While it remains unclear if the buyer used fiat or crypto for his purchase, “Everydays” marks the first time ETH was supported as a payment option in Christie’s 255-year-old history.

The 5,000 images in “Everydays” cover topics such as society’s obsession and fear of technology, the desire for and resentment of wealth, and the U.S. political history. Beeple’s previous record-setting NFT art piece was a depiction of a monumental Donald Trump lying face down in the grass and covered in graffiti. That particular NFT was auctioned on the Nifty Gateway NFT marketplace for around $6.6 million worth of ETH.