On March 11, 2021, Christie's auction house sold an NFT by digital artist Beeple, formally Mike Winkelmann, for $69.3 million. The work was titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a single image composed of 5000 individual works the artist had been making every day for over thirteen years. The sale was the largest amount ever paid for a digital artwork. It was also the moment when NFTs became impossible to ignore.
The technology that made the sale possible was not new. NFTs had existed since 2017 in various forms. CryptoKitties had briefly congested the Ethereum network in late 2017 with a collectible cat trading craze. The mechanics of representing ownership of a unique digital asset on a blockchain had been available for years. What changed in early 2021 was attention, money, and the willingness of the established art market to engage with the format.
The Beeple sale was the catalyst that opened the floodgates. Within weeks, NFT marketplaces were processing hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume. Artists who had been making digital work for decades suddenly had a market for their output. Speculators who had no particular interest in art started buying NFTs as financial instruments. The mainstream press tried to explain what an NFT was, mostly badly, while the technology and the meaning of the technology kept shifting under their explanations.
The question that the sale brought into focus was about what was actually being bought. The image file existed publicly. Anyone could right-click and save a copy. What the buyer of the NFT acquired was an entry on the Ethereum blockchain pointing to that file, signed by the artist as the original. That entry was unique and could be transferred. The image was not.
For some buyers and observers, this distinction was profound and worth millions. For others, it was an unconvincing argument about the nature of digital ownership. Both reactions were defensible. What was harder to argue was that the technology had created a new way for digital artists to monetise their work and a new asset class that financial markets would not be able to ignore in the months that followed.
The boom that followed the Beeple sale would later look like a textbook bubble. The technology underneath would survive the bubble in ways that would matter later. The art world had been forced to engage with the format whether it wanted to or not.