Christie’s has revealed that the $69 million Beeple artwork has been acquired by NFT fund Metapurse. The fund, which is led by Twobadour and Metakovan, responded to the reveal with the statement: “Beeple’s Magnum Opus: It was us”. They had already bought the twenty unique NFT artworks that Beeple auctioned late 2020.
On Friday Metapurse acquired the NFT artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple for a record of $69.3 million or $42329.453 ETH. They outbid other potential buyers, including Tron Foundation chief Justin Sun. The art piece by Beeple is now the most expensive NFT and digital artwork ever. In addition it the third most expensive artwork ever sold by a modern day artist.
“When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat. And here’s why – it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.”
Metakovan, press release – March 12th 2021
The name might sound familiar. Metapurse acquired 20 Beeple artworks last year, bundled them, put them into some virtual museums, then locked the NFT artworks into a smart contract and launched the B20 token. This token launched for less than a dollar, and is now just worth more than 20 dollar. It underlines the impact the artworks by Beeple are having across the community, the NFT space and art as a whole.
Beeple buyout option is live
Anybody with enough DAI and 5% of the B20 tokens in their wallet, can trigger an auction to buyout the entire Beeple B20 bundle and the virtual museums that come with it. When triggered, the auction will take place through Whalestreet. This entire auction will last 48 epochs, which each epoch being 8 hours. During this time anybody can outbid the first bidder, which triggers an extension of another 9 epochs.
The community can also veto the bid. This requires 25% of the community to stake their B20 tokens into the smart contract. The auction will be reset and the minimum price will now be 8% higher from the previous bid.
About B20 token
Metapurse shared ownership over their $2.2 million Beeple art collection and the virtual museums where they show the art through the B20 token. On Saturday January 23rd they organized a public sale for the B20 tokens. A total of 1.6 million tokens will sell for 36 cents a piece, which is 16 percent of the total supply.
The entire project had a value of 2.7 million dollars, according to the tokenomics of the project. Metapurse kept 59 percent of the tokens, while 11 percent went to collaborators like Metacast, GrowYourBase and Voxel Architects. Eight percent sold in a private sale, four percent went to stakeholders and two percent to Beeple. More about the initial B20 launch here.
What is crypto art?
Crypto art is a piece of digital art that is tokenized on the blockchain as a non-fungible token or NFT. That means that the owner of the token will always hold a proven and original copy of a piece of art. Just like physical art, there can be unlimited copies. But ultimately there can only be one Mona Lisa.
Mostly we value art for its aesthetics and cultural relevance, but above all on the ability to verify the creator and its proven rarity. With blockchain technology these last two features are part of the blockchain. Everybody can see and confirm who minted these original creations.
The concept of seeing a digital image as art, is one thing. However, for many people it will be a challenge to consider digital images as valuable. Consider this: The Mona Lisa is worth many millions of dollars. If I would paint the Mona Lisa in an exact copy, it would be worth only 50 dollars. Because we all know where the original version is.
Being able to verify the authenticity and rarity of a piece of art is crucial. In the end everything can be art. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a still image, moving image, video, music or a combination of everything.
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