Nowadays we see how the world situation is suddenly changing, since something that was highly criticized and even banned a few years ago, is now called by companies and financial institutions as the best investment instrument: the best investment instrument, and we can see this as institutions still anchored to a traditional economic system, are demonstrating that the idea of embracing a degital economy with cryptocurrencies, can be very beneficial and have decided to join the crypto world of investment. But in addition to this widespread trend of adoption of cryptocurrencies, a trend that will dominate the market very widely in the coming years is also booming, it is the NFT art, a new way of making art that has managed to hook many musicians, artists and filmmakers. Since up to this moment it is still surprising how each piece sold, achieves a great success, reaching historical maximums in sales.
And about the emergence of the NFT market, I talked in a post 21 days ago where I mentioned the great historical record in sales that the NFT market had between January and February, which at that time was a great sum of more than 100 million dollars, and the NFT art that topped the list was the NBA Top SHop collectible cards with more than 60 million in sales.
But it didn't stop there, as the NFT market continued to increase in sales the following month, as between February 4 and March 4, $500 million in NFT sales were recorded, surpassing the total sales recorded in all of 2020, and again, the top seller between February 4 and March 4 was the NBA Top SHop collectible cards with over $60 million in sales, the top seller between February and March was NBA Top Shop as it continued to hold the top spot in the market with its collectible NBA player trading cards, and the top spot was also held by CryptoPunks, which together accounted for 40% of all sales at over $200 million.
But besides seeing companies selling NFT art or even 24x24px images achieving market domination, there are now other unique players in the NFT arena that are demonstrating the great potential and benefit of NFT for artists. So far, the most recent NFT that was sold in an auction, achieved a historical maximum by selling for a sum of $69.3 million, positioning its creator as one of the 3 living artists with more money raised by art sales, and the person behind this piece is nothing more and nothing less than Mike Winkelmann or better known as BEEPLE.
The piece that has been sold, was named by beeple as: "Everydays: The first 5000 days". Which, as he himself said, what makes it valuable is that it is composed of 5000 images taken every day in a span of 14 years, which portrays greed, fear, resentment, and unstable politics in the history of the USA.
What is interesting about this particular work of art is that when it was put up for auction on February 26, it started with a price as low as $100 and gradually climbed to an all-time high for an NFT sold at nearly $70 million. Also, the auction of this NFT was an important step in the world of art and auctions, as Christie's auction house mentioned, "Everydays: The first 5000 days" was the first piece of art purely digital.
Which, clearly will give a step to more artists preferring to tokenize all their work and sell it as a NFT, thus protecting it from plagiarism and getting good benefits, as I have read that the author of the work receives a percentage every time the NFT is resold. Thus achieving that little by little the domination of the market will be cryptocurrencies and decentralized economy.
So benefits of tokenized art as NFT, we find many, and as they are in total boom, we will see more and more often as the NFT market gains more popularity and achieves new record highs in sales, in addition to seeing hundreds of auction houses desperate to find mainly NFT art as gold nuggets to sell.
But as things that benefit everyone, a minority elite don't like it, so new problems are arising for NFT that the execptics are spreading just as they did with cryptocurrency mining, but we'll talk about that in another post.