A piece of digital artwork has sold for a mind-blowing $69.3 million at auction.
Storied auction house Christie’s has wrapped its sale of “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” by crypto artist Beeple.
The winning bid just after 10:00 a.m. ET for the non-fungible token (NFT) was a staggering $60.25 million. A last-minute surge upped the final price to $69,346,250.
In the final minutes of the auction, the price jumped from the $20 million range to over $50 million.
It’s by far the largest known sale of an NFT, a special type of token that lives on the Ethereum blockchain and proves digital ownership of its associated media.
Ether (ETH) was supported as a payment vehicle in a first for the 255-year-old auction house. At press time, it is unclear if the buyer used fiat or crypto to buy the now-famous Beeple.
Beeple’s previous record-breaking auction was in February on NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. That piece, a video clip of a digitally illustrated Donald Trump lying face down in the grass, sold for $6.6 million in ETH.
According to the New York Times, the most expensive painting ever sold was a Leonardo da Vinci that went for $450.3 million in 2017.
This is a developing story and will be updated.