"Pak is our Picasso."
The Pixel
The NFT isn't dead.
A single pixel, a part of an NFT by digital artist Pak, sold for $1.36 million worth of Ether, Reuters reports, at the famed auction house Sotheby's.
The work was part of a larger series of digital artworks that sold for a whopping $16.8 million combined. Most notable among them was "The Pixel," which as its name suggests, was an image of a single grey block. Three bidders spent about an hour fighting over the pixel, The Wall Street Journal reports.
It's an unusual sale that goes to show the NFT isn't finished yet, despite plummeting average values over the last month. The trend saw a massive surge in popularity earlier this year, with some works of art selling for as much as $69 million, but prices have crashed by almost 70 percent as of late, according to a recent report by NonFungible.com.
Cubes (FOE)➡️ NFTs
"Thousand Cubes" (3)
"Five Hundred Cubes" (4)
"Hundred Cubes" (34)
"Fifty Cubes" (38)
"Twenty Cubes" (120)
"Ten Cubes" (247)
"Five Cubes" (569)
"A Cube" (5135)26 Cubes and above is in top 100.
Top 100 will receive "Complexity". pic.twitter.com/e3Xvw0cHVn— Pak (@muratpak) April 16, 2021
Cubes on Cubes
Sotheby's even broke its own rules to sell an "open edition" during this week's sale, according to the Journal, meaning that an endless supply of a single artwork could be sold during a predetermined time slot. Almost 20,000 "Cubes" sold for $500 a piece in just 15 minutes.
A different piece, called, "Equilibrium" is a simple white orb that unpeels like an onion.
The artist, known as Pak, chooses to remain anonymous. It's not even clear if the moniker represents just one or multiple artists.
Suiting the cryptic persona, Pak revealed that the NFTs could be "burned" as well, the act of converting the tokens into the artist's own cryptocurrency called ASH.
ASH is an "NFT burning platform" that can permanently remove crypto tokens from circulation. To earn ASH, people have to "burn NFTs" by converting them on the website burn.art.
It's an unusual art sale that is bound to appeal to cryptocurrency nerds and art nerds everywhere.
"Pak is our Picasso," Philippines-based executive Colin Goltra told the Journal.
READ MORE: Digital Artist Pak Sells NFT Works for $17 Million at Sotheby’s [The Wall Street Journal]
More on NFTs: Not Very Surprisingly, NFT Prices Are Now Crashing
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