A Jpeg file by digital artist Beeple sold for an astounding 69$ million at NFT auction

A montage by American artist Beeple has become the most expensive digital image ever to be sold, fetching over $69 million at an auction. The piece, titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days, become the first purely digital artwork backed by a non-fungible token (NFT) to be put under the hammer by a major auction house.

An NFT is a blockchain-based certificate of authenticity that can be assigned to virtual artworks to verify their origin and ownership. As the artwork shot up to $69,346,250 on the final day.

“The beginning of the next chapter in art history”

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The advent of NFTs has made it possible for original digital artworks, which can be very easily duplicated, to be sold, collected and traded for profit just like physical art.

“Artists have been using hardware and software to create artwork and distribute it on the internet for the last 20 plus years but there was never a real way to truly own and collect it”

Mike Winklmann aka Beeple

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Winkelmann has been posting digital artwork on his Instagram every day since May of 2007, during which time his account has garnered almost 2 million followers. The record-breaking artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days is a collage of his daily digital creations spanning more than 13 years.

The artist sold his first two NFT-backed artworks in October 2020, fetching $66,666 each. Only a few months later in February 2021, one of these artworks was resold on crypto art marketplace Nifty Gateway for a hundred times as much, earning the owner $6.6 million.