Sotheby’s and NFT: the sale of PAK’s works with Nifty Gateway
Digital artist Pak sells NFT works for $ 17 million at Sotheby’s
After the success of the auction held by Christie’s which saw the work of the digital artist Beeple reach over 69 million dollars, Sotheby’s debuted in the Crypto Art market in collaboration with Pak and Nifty Gateway, raising 16.8 million dollars.
For the first time in the history of art, a crypto artist, an auction house and a marketplace specialized in NFT have collaborated for the sale of works of art in NFT: unlike the sale of Beeple at Christie’s which took place on the auction house website, this time the sale took place directly on the Nifty Gateway platform.
But who is Pak?
Pak is the Crypto Artist who has recently gained everyone’s attention thanks to the sale of the abstract NFT work Metarift, sold for 904,413.47 million dollars on the MakersPlace platform.
Faceless artist, Pak is known for being the creator of Archillect, a latest generation art curator, an artificial intelligence that publishes visual content on social media based on an algorithm.
How did the sale take place on Nifty Gateway in collaboration with Sotheby’s?
The “The Fungible” collection consisting of the “Fungible Open Editions” collection, a set of NFT cubes that can potentially be bought indefinitely between 12 and 14 April, were auctioned starting from a fixed price of 500 dollars for the first day, and then grow to $ 1,000 in the second and $ 1,500 in the third.
With this collection, the artist wanted to reflect on the meaning of the value of a work, playing with the concept of “uniqueness” that Blockchain technology is able to transfer to every single NFT.
The first day reserved for the sale of “The Fungible Open Edition” ended with 19,880 cubes sold in 15 minutes with a yield of 9.87 million dollars.
On the second day, another 3,268 cubes were sold for a total of $ 3.3 million over the same time period.
On the third day, 593 sales were recorded: in total there were 3,080 buyers who spent about 14 million dollars for 23,598 cubes.
To these awards must be added those of two NFTs for sale as unique works.
“The Switch” was sold to Californian cryptocurrency investor Damian Medina for $ 1,444,444 million, while another work, “The Pixel”, sold for $ 1,355.555 million to crypto collector Eric Young, after a hour and a half of advanced offers from the best NFT art collectors.
In a Clubhouse room hosted by Sotheby’s during the final minutes of the sale, an attendee claimed that the stretched offer was itself an act of “performance art”.
While no record figures have been achieved, the large number of attendees coupled with the results of over a million dollars for digital art are useful signs that the demand for NFT is still present and constantly evolving.
