500 Crores! This is what this Image below was sold for!

“Everyday’s – The first 5000 days”, it’s the most expensive artwork sold by a living Artist.

Unbelievable! I could have created that ..

But, I didn’t.

An artist named Mike Winkleman AKA Beeple created the digital Art  & sold it for millions of dollars as an NFT.

What is that?

It’s a NON FUNGIBLE TOKEN. It’s a new phenomenon that has taken over the investment world.

It’s everything that one cannot understand about the ART World combined with everything one cannot understand about CRYPTOS.

Most of us are aware that physical paintings, sculptures various antiquities are being traded for millions of dollars. Now digital Art or assets are being bought as an NFT.

It’s hard to understand the concept with an old-school mindset. Even so, let’s just try and wrap our heads around it.

Let me explain it via an example of digital art and how & why it’s bought and sold.

We all know the Amul mascot right? It’s instantly recognisable and is one of the most loved characters in India. Created by Art director Eustace Fernandes, working for Da cunha communications.

Let’s say he owns it and puts up 25 original copies of called tokens as digital artwork on a platform.

The person who buys it gets a digital token of the Artwork which is signed by the creator and is authenticated.

But the image can still be used and copied and be downloaded by the public at large.

There are many eccentric rich people, collectors, and speculators in this world. Someone may decide to bid for the NFT. He wins the bid he becomes the proud owner of token no 1 of the Amul girl.

The NFT means the specific number of the item, ( can be a baseball card, a piece of music, a youtube video )  which is unique.

If the buyer so decides he can put it up for bidding and sell it on the marketplace. Every time it changes hands the artist earns a cut or a commission.

The value is in the scarcity.

Cool.

The question is why anyone would buy anything which can be seen, downloaded, copied on the internet.

Who knows?

Most likely for the joy of owning it which is what collecting art & rarities is all about.

As explained by someone, it’s like owning Mona Lisa which is permanently hung at the Louvre. If more people come & see it or paint a copy of it will it erode its value?

No, on the contrary, it will increase its value.

If you own the Mona Lisa, you will know it and probably there will be a plaque next to it which states that owned by Mr. X, so the world will know it.

That’s Gold.

And eventually, you as the owner may decide to part ways with it and hopefully, make a handsome profit on it.

How do Cryptos or BlockChain come into the picture?

NFT’s are sold on the Ethereum BlockChain network. It is like this huge anonymous, untamperable ledger maintained by huge computers all over the world.

All the transactions are recorded in this network so the person who owns the NFT, Amul Baby 1 only can  sell that non-fungible token. It’s meticulously recorded so there cannot be any doubt on the owner.

Every time a person trades on the tokens, the artist also makes some money.

So this Artist Beeple had a huge following on Instagram, has been forever making jepgs or digital art. Christies decided to sell it as an experiment. It got sold for a cool 69 mill dollars, and Christie’s made 15 mill $.

The question is who bought it for that staggering sum of money.

Surprisingly, two people of Indian origin  Mr. Vignesh Sundarsen & Anand Venkateswaran have bought it.

They have written a blog post on the Beeple NFT buy on Substack. You can read it here.

So what do I think of NFTs? Sure, it looks like a crazy hyped-up bubble. Or maybe it is will be the future how anything digital will be sold.

Who knows? It may take a more palatable form or die a sudden death.

Meanwhile, I am thinking of bidding for the first-ever tweet by Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter being sold in an auction as an NFT 🙂 :).

It being bid only for 2.5 million $$.

Who wouldn’t want to own it ? I would, for sure. It’s a piece of new-age history.