Auction House Christie’s New York will sell a Bitcoin artwork and the corresponding non-fungible token. The creators have offered the first twenty paintings in their series of forty to collectors and prominent names in the blockchain space. The twenty-first painting will be auctioned on October 7th with an estimated price ranging between 12 and 18 thousand dollars.
The artworks are based on the code that drives the Bitcoin blockchain. In addition all the artworks together form a 50 meters creation with 12.3 million digits of code. By splitting the complete code over 40 paintings, nobody will ever hold the code. Pure decentralization.
Alongside the physical painting there’s also a digital copy stored on the Ethereum blockchain as a non-fungible token. This NFT serves as a prove of authenticity and a digital representation of the physical painting. Block 21 is just the first auction, numbers 22 to 40 will also go on sale.
This is Christie’s first time presenting a work that explores crypto culture at auction and, as ever, we are very excited to welcome new audiences and collecting communities across the globe to Christie’s.
Vivian Brodie, Contemporary Art Special at Christie’s
Lots of attention for blockchain technology
The auction of a Bitcoin-inspired artworks has obviously nothing to with market trends, but it sure is a sign. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets are taking a more prominent role every single day. The European Union and the United States are very serious about implementing their own digital currencies. Ultimately cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin will have the hardest money, because there’s a limitation to the amount that there will ever be.
It’s safe to say that the odds are in favor of the blockchain industry, even though there’s still a lot of work to be done. Many people don’t understand the technology and don’t see value in digital assets. At the same time tech savvy investors are pumping thousands and sometimes millions of dollars in blockchain projects. This week investors even made their interest in non-fungible tokens public.
Since June 2020 the market for crypto art slowly started increasing its volume. Data from Nonfungible.com suggests that on June 1st there was 15 thousand dollars of trading volume in the art segment. Now we’re in September and the daily trading volume is fluctuating around 100 thousand dollars.
