When NFTs Go Boom

What do we talk about when we talk about NFTs? Here’s a glimpse into the crypto sensation that’s disrupting the art world and dominating cultural discourse.

- Min Chen

Late in 2017, when auction house Christie’s banged the gavel on the astounding top bid of US$450 million ($597.9 million) for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, it set the record for the most expensive painting to be sold at auction. Nothing came close to outstripping that transaction, that is until early March this year when the auctioneer concluded the sale of every day's: The First 5,000 Days for US$69.3 million. It’s no Mundi-scale price tag, but then again, it’s no Mundi: the work was created by digital artist Beeple and is represented by a non-fungible token (NFT). With it, Christie’s achieved the third-highest auction price from a living artist and marked its first sale of a purely digital work in cryptocurrency.

At that, the art world scoffed. “JPG File Sells for $69 Million”, The New York Times quipped. “NFTs are Creating the Opposite of Everything They’re Meant to Fix”, went ARTNews. Meanwhile, critics rallied to anatomise the work, the sale and the NFT market. For better or worse, such disruption was why the auction’s highest bidders, Metakovan and Twobadour of the Singapore-based crypto fund Metapurse, threw their Ethereum behind the work.

“One of the bigger reasons why we went for Beeple was to divert the attention of people to the space,” Twobadour (aka Anand Venkateswaran) tells me. “It’s sort of a clean slate and in a sense, it decentralises culture because there is no totem pole in the crypto art space.”