If ever there was a doubt about the future of NFTs & Crypto Art, it is no more. The success of the recent $3.5M Beeple drop signifies the inevitable evolution of Crypto Art from a niche market to the mainstream.
If you have no idea what NFTs are, check out these articles.
[1] What is an NFT & How do I make money from selling my art as a NFT?
[2] The Crypto Art World ?
This will be a detailed explanation talking about Beeple’s second NiftyGateway NFT drop.
On the 9th of December, Beeple announced this tweet, hyping up his second drop. This tweet was the start of something BIG; NFTs backed by signed physicals, with a hair sample in each one to verify authenticity.
100 $1 editions, 3 open editions for 5 minutes & 21 1/1 auctions spanning two days!
Beeple dropped a link to beeple-collect.com in this tweet explaining everything in his drop, 2 days before to create the hype required — for the next 2 days after this, he shared messages with Tyler Winklevoss. APompliano tweeted about what was going to happen.
I took my time to write a thread as I knew how big this is going to be and I also went for Beeple’s past drop on the secondary market so I was going to support him either way, check this thread below to fully understand how Beeple’s drop was going to work!
Now lets get into when the drop happened, 7PM EST Friday 11th December.
NiftyGateway did a great job and held up the site as it did not crash during this time despite the thousands of users trying to get a drop. The $1 drop instantly sold out again and the 3 open editions that were up for 5 minutes had over 580 individual sales between them.
The Bull Run sold 271 times, Into The Ether sold 207 times and Infected sold 123 times — resulting in over $580K in 5 MINUTES.
This doubled what Beeple got in his previous drop and is over 10% of the total volume of SuperRare.
These $1 drops went on to sell for thousands in minutes and all 20 auctions were raised to bids of $6,666 by Pablo within HOURS. The secondary market volume for the $1 pieces and open editions began to boost up in price as collectors saw tremendous market interest — the lowest price for these physical open editions hit over $5,000 as numbers such as #1 sold for $11,000!
Towards the end of the first day auctions, crazy bidding wars ensued with new profiles coming up such as Nunnian, Viminal, Quirinal & Caelian. A lot of us were watching these live bidding wars and below are the pieces sold on Saturday!
10 of the 21 auction pieces were sold on Saturday — with a whopping $942,866!
On the same day these auctions happened, a #4 Into The Ether sold for $100,000+ on the secondary market, originally sold for less then $1,000.
All these auctions had a lot of bidding wars with plenty of known whales losing to these unknown bidders, which my good friend, Akira found out as the auctions were going on.
These were all organized bids and due to the recent ETH-based payment option introduced in NiftyGateway, no one could track who they were. Interestingly the names Nunnian, Viminal, Quirinal & Caelian were a reference to the Seven hills of Rome as seen below.
Other bidders who won the 1/1s consisted of MetaPurse & mcap.
We realized that MetaPurse never bid against these accounts and these accounts never bid against MetaPurse so we gathered that MetaPurse was the one buying all these 1/1s.
Check out what happened on Sunday for the final auctions!
The secondary market volume kept increasing for the open editions and the $1 editions as the day went on till it was Sunday again and the final 1/1s were ending — here is what happened.
These next 10 auctions sold for another HUGE amount, reaching $1,251,000 in sales adding up to over $2.6M in 3 days. Now MetaPurse, the fund, managed to get EVERY single 1/1 as we concluded and it was them as they all deposited into one address.
MetaPurse went for the final 1/1 but this ended with a crazy bidding war as shown below, the 21st auction ended at $777,777 by illestrater who I talk to later in this article.
MetaKovan is an owner of MetaPurse and they decided to go for the final 1/1 as said above, however — Illestrater did not let them win this as they went forth in a crazy bidding war and in the final second of the auction, Illestrater DOUBLED the auction price and won it — $777,777.
In the middle of this final auction, there was also a leaked NFT that was shown for minutes before being removed by the developers.
I spoke to Illestrater and asked him a few questions regarding the Beeple drop and here are his answers and thoughts —
:’) I’m proud to have landed the final with the bid number I put up myself, I really do hope it will be iconic but we shall see.. it’s my biggest wish for crypto to become understood as a liberating technology and I’m unsure people understand yet — but this particular space can be the best way to communicate that.
I just want them to get in the MoMA just like Beeple does haha
“In 10 years, how will this Beeple collection affect other small artists?”
Beeple as a genuine person is very kind and personable and his work ethic is something everyone should look up to. Just day by day commit to a craft you love. He held out for 13 years and gives so much away under creative commons, it’s spectacular and he deserves this.
I surely hope this event reaches widespread media to illustrate the story he lives, and as the paradigm shift may accelerate, more and more opportunity will exist for all artists!
Illestrater is an amazing guy and I’m happy that he could share his thoughts with you guys so you can understand why this part of history is made, Illestrater is also the same person who bought a secondary market piece for $100,000+ for some more statistics.
I’d like to talk about some of my thoughts now regarding a lot of people talking about Beeple’s drop —
“Scarcity doesn’t exist anymore”
Over the few days that Beeple has broken records in the Crypto Art world, the argument about Scarcity (check here if you want to understand what this means) still remains relevant.
People argue that Beeple has broken the scarcity rule but here are some words from him —
Another thing is that Scarcity isn’t just a certain timeframe between artworks but rather a small percentage of artworks available per year, we do not know when the next Beeple drop will be nor does it change the fact.
However, most importantly —
“The whole thing is grounded in economics as opposed to art. Some people just have an inherent need to create, just as if they were breathing air. How can you tell them in order to be “successful” that they must impose limits of scarcity?
It also suggests that people are collecting for speculation purposes and not a love or connection to the work. I think the artists that will do the best are the ones that elicit the most attachment to their pieces, not those who game some sort of Scarcity/Abundance formula to drive a financial return for their collectors.” — Colborn
Beeple $MEME Collaboration
Another secret thing hidden in Beeple’s collection is if his pineapple artworks hit over $69,000 — he would release a collaboration with $MEME in Q1 2021. It hit way over the price as we saw and he tweeted about it, $MEME boosted in price.
If someone wants to own a 1/1 NFT from Beeple, they would have to pay with $MEME for this collaboration which means the price will certainly boost in price — over 110% as of 12:32 (14/12/2020).
Conclusion
The current final statistics for Beeple’s NFT drop is over $3.5M in primary sales with the secondary market over $400,000 & growing.
This is not something that will regularly recur in this space as a whole, however positive effects will relay onto smaller artists. The more news that spreads, the more investors will enter and these investors won’t invest in every small artist… but some will. In a space that has such high returns on investments, you will notice the bigger artists getting even bigger bids — but what happens when the money aspect isn’t all that matters anymore?
When the space is so big these whales right now can’t go for the biggest artists as its out of their budget?
They will find the new artists, collectors grow an artist, artists build collectors — keep creating!
Beeple deserves this all and so do we, everyone in the Crypto Art community benefits from this as mainstream news is going to catch on to how BIG this will be, smaller artists are worried that only big artists will sell for big prices however —
“Roughly $30 million in cryptoart sales to date represents a mere 0.005% of the total crypto market cap of $560 billion.” — @niftytime
This should be put in perspective when we mention money, artists will always create and Crypto Art shouldn’t pressure you to change your art to sell because the money will come as the space grows.
I hope you read this article to the bottom and it inspired you how big this space is, Crypto Art will KEEP growing.
I drop my thoughts on my twitter and I build Crypto Art/NFT projects in this space, drop a follow if you have time! — Loopifyyy.
I’m growing the biggest place for information about Crypto Art and NFTs here, subscribe to get the most out of the space, EARLY.
loop-news.com
