Famous auction house Christie’s will accept Ether as a form of payment. Some months ago, the British auction house sold a physical painting that recreates Bitcoin’s founding code.

Famous 250-year-old auction house Christie’s will auction its first tokenized digital artwork on the Ethereum blockchain. Between February 25th and March 11th, they will offer a non-expendable token (NFT) with a 5,000-piece collage that artist Mike Winkelmann.

The artist, also known as Beeple, created it exclusively for Christie’s, who classifies it as “a unique digital artwork”. The token brings together all the images that he created every day from 2007 to 2021. It is now a unique piece that he called “Every Day: The First 5,000 Days”.

On Christie’s website, they detail that they recently coined the NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. They also state that that it is a work of 21,069 x 21,069 pixels (equivalent to 319,168,313 bytes). In the physical world, this would represent a huge 100-square-meter mural about the size of 2 Olympic swimming pools.

According to the auction house, the initial bid is USD 100, and they will accept Ether as a form of payment.

Before Christie’s became interested in auctioning Beeple’s work, they already considered him “one of the world’s leading digital artists.” He exhibited his works on platforms like Nifty Gateway, a blockchain-based market that exhibits the most wanted digital arts and collectibles. There, he sold 21 of his original works in December last year, generating USD 3.5 million worth of cryptocurrencies.

The artist’s success just two months after he met cryptocurrencies did not go unnoticed by the auction house. This is especially true after a year in which galleries and museums closed their doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tokens, Bitcoin and Blockchain in the Evolution of Art

Even though Beeple’s work is the first NFT-based work that Christie’s will auction, it is not their first blockchain-related auction. Last October, Christie’s sold a work called “Block 21”, which combined a physical painting with an NFT, for USD 131,250. They obtained more than 10 times the estimated value for its sale.

That work is part of Robert Alice’s “Portraits of a Mind”. It is a global art project that recreates in 40 fragments what Bitcoin’s founding code would be like in the physical world. This is the largest artwork in the history of blockchain technology, with 40 frames over 50 meters long. He painted each of the 12.3 million digits of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original code by hand, with each painting containing 322,048 digits.

The specialists at NFT Async Labs developed the NFT, who describe it as a work with a “space-time” connection. This means that the digital component of the artwork is only visible during the day within the time zone where it is located.

Galleries and other spaces that traditionally dedicate to exhibiting physical works of art have closed, but the metaverse creates new places for them. One of these scenarios is in Decentraland, where renowned cartoonist Argentine José Delbo has exhibited his works.

By Alexander Salazar

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