On March 11, 2021, the world was introduced to NFTs through a single extraordinary event. A digital artist named Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, sold an NFT at Christie’s auction house for $69 million. The piece was called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” — a collage of 5,000 individual digital artworks that Beeple had created, one per day, over nearly 14 years.
Beeple was already known in the digital art world. He had been creating and posting daily artworks since May 1, 2007, without missing a day. His work had gotten increasingly surreal and political over the years, featuring grotesque satirical imagery of tech billionaires, political figures, and cultural moments. He had millions of followers on Instagram but had never sold physical art — his work was meant to be viewed for free online.
Then came the NFT boom of early 2021. Suddenly, digital artists could sell their work as NFTs, with each piece represented by a unique token on the Ethereum blockchain. Beeple embraced the medium enthusiastically. In December 2020, he sold his first NFTs on the platform Nifty Gateway. By February 2021, individual Beeple NFTs were selling for six figures. Christie’s — the oldest and most prestigious auction house in the world — took notice and approached Beeple about auctioning a piece.
The “Everydays” auction was a 14-day online event. Bidding started at just $100. It quickly escalated. Within minutes, bids were in the thousands. Within hours, hundreds of thousands. By the final day, millions. The final bid of $69,346,250 came in the last seconds of the auction. It made Beeple the third most valuable living artist, behind only Jeff Koons and David Hockney. It also made him, in dollar terms, one of the most successful digital artists in history.
The sale was a cultural earthquake. Mainstream media covered it extensively. People who had never heard of NFTs, Bitcoin, or Ethereum suddenly asked “What is an NFT?” Traditional art collectors were outraged and intrigued. Art critics debated whether digital art could really be worth $69 million. The crypto community celebrated — this was the validation they had been waiting for. For better or worse, the Beeple auction made NFTs a mainstream phenomenon and kicked off the wildest NFT speculation ever seen.
Leave a Reply