Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known by the pseudonym Beeple, called the non-fungible token (NFT) segment a bubble in an appearance on Fox News Sunday.
His digital art piece sold for $69 million. Mike Winkelmann, AKA “Beeple” is our Power Player of the week. @beeple #FoxNewsSunday pic.twitter.com/46lQq4vjyk
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) March 21, 2021
To be blunt, I am absolutely sure this is a bubble. I draw an analogy with the early days of the Internet. There was a bubble. And that bubble burst,\” Winkelmann said.
The artist added that the bursting dot-com bubble did not destroy the Internet. In Beeple’s view, NFT technology is strong enough to weather this period.
Winkelmann is the author of the work “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, which went under the hammer for $69.3 million at Christie’s auction house. The artist called the observation of the auction’s end “very surreal”.
“The price jumped from $27 million to $50 million. I literally felt a bomb blast in the room,” Beeple said.
“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is a collage of thousands of Winkelmann works published on the Internet since 2007. The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan [Vignesh Sundaresan], who operated under the alias Metakovan.
“By Friday evening, that guy had my piece, and I had $55 million in the bank. Boom, done, the next day,” Beeple said.
At the time of writing Winkelmann is selling the NFT “OCEAN FRONT” on the Nifty Gateway marketplace. With 15 hours to go in the auction, the top bid stood at $1.55 million. The artist plans to donate the proceeds to climate-change efforts.
In late February Beeple’s NFT token featuring Trump was resold for $6.6 million. In December 2020, the artist earned $582,000 for “Crossroad”.
Subscribe to ForkLog news on Telegram: ForkLog Feed — the full news feed, ForkLog — the most important news and polls.