Beeple Sells for $69 Million
A digital artist sold a JPEG for $69 million. NFTs went mainstream overnight.
Date
2021-03-11
Impact
bullish
On March 11, 2021, digital artist Mike Winkelmann — known as Beeple — sold his piece "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" at Christie's auction house for $69.3 million in ETH. It was the first purely digital NFT artwork sold by a major auction house and the third-highest price achieved by a living artist at the time. The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan (MetaKovan), founder of Metapurse. The sale sent shockwaves through both the art and crypto worlds, triggering an NFT mania that lasted throughout 2021. Suddenly everyone from celebrities to brands was minting NFTs. It legitimized digital art as a collectible asset class and brought mainstream media attention to crypto like nothing before it. The $69 million number — widely noted as intentional internet humor — became synonymous with the peak of NFT euphoria.