The most notable event was the sale of Beeple’s work ‘Every Day: The First 5000 Days’, the first NFT artwork auctioned at renowned Christie’s. It was sold for $69.3 million, making this NFT created by Winkelmann the most expensive in the whole history of crypto art.
After this record-setting sale of Beeple’s work, the auction house announced a sale of a single lot of nine CryptoPunks which was bought for $16.9 million in early May. It was the first time NFTs have been offered alongside Andy Warhol’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artworks.
At the same time, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, sold NFT presenting his very first tweet, for more than $3 million, and Elon Musk tweeted a potentially salable techno track about NFTs.
All these events and many others have resonated with a broad audience and potential new content creators, whose number increased exponentially in the first months of 2021.
Despite the apparent calm, interest in the NFT field, and as a result, their market is still growing. Sales volumes remain at a consistently high level and continue to break records.
In the first six months of 2021, NFTs’ sales reached $2.5 billion (according to DappRadar). At the same time, this figure is greatly underestimated since the source tracks only on-chain sales, that is, on the blockchain, without taking into account large off-chain sales of NFTs, for example, from auctions. NonFungible.com’s number is $1.3 billion, excluding around $8 billion of DeFi NFTs.
The NFTs weekly trading volume on the leading exchanges grew from... <read it in the next part of "NFTs: 2021 hype & beyond" tomorrow>