Non-fungible tokens have quickly become a mainstream phenomenon, with a slew of celebrities, entertainers, and sports figures promoting them. The question is, which NFT has had the greatest impact on this burgeoning industry?
There’s no denying that NFTs have taken the world by storm, with some of the most popular digital collectibles commanding exorbitant prices, prompting a stampede of newcomers eager to cash in on the trend.
While many have tried to cash in on the apparent success of NFTs, a few notable digital collectible creators have had their NFTs sell for millions of dollars at auction. NFTs have become the new-age autograph in a short amount of time, and their use has spread across a wide range of industries.
As blockchain-powered digital collectibles marketplaces boom for American sports leagues such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League, the world of sport has taken a liking to NFTs. Beeple’s $69 million digital art piece broke auction records and changed the way people enjoy and own art, indicating that the art industry is undergoing a new age renaissance of sorts. Musicians, celebrities, and content creators have all launched their own NFTs, which are changing the way fans and consumers buy memorabilia, merchandise, and content.
Here are some of the most popular NFTs in 2021, with information on the developers or original owners as well as the current value of those NFTs.
Beeple’s “Everydays”
Beeple’s now-famous digital collage “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is an obvious choice for this list of prominent NFTs. Its price alone has cemented its reputation as the most valuable NFT ever sold at auction.
The digital collage was created by American digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known by his nickname Beeple, and sold for $69,346,250 in February 2021 at renowned auction house Christie’s.
Over the past 13 and a half years, Beeple has been releasing a piece of digital art every single day, and “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is a collage of 5,000 of these objects.
The NFT’s jaw-dropping price tag was only realized in the last two minutes of the auction, when the digital art piece saw a drastic rise in the value of offers, moving up from a $20 million offer to a final bid for about $60 million. The $9 million difference was due to Christie’s buyer’s premium.
Jack Dorsey’s $2.9-million genesis tweet
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey successfully auctioned off the digital rights to his first-ever tweet from March 2006, in a strange and wonderful use-case example for NFTs. In March 2021, the NFT tweet was ultimately sold for $2.9 million, with the proceeds going to the GiveDirectly fund.
On March 6th, Dorsey posted a link on his Twitter profile that directed users to an online auction for his 2006 tweet, which was also the first-ever made on the popular social media website 15 years ago.
“Just setting up my twttr,” says Dorsey’s first tweet, which he posted in March 2006. Dorsey’s digitally autographed tweet drew a lot of interest, but Sina Estavi, the CEO of Tron-based Bridge Oracle, won it.
Edward Snowden’s NFT
Another well-known person who has raised a lot of money by selling of an NFT is American whistleblower Edward Snowden. He made headlines in 2021 when he raised $5 million for the Freedom of the Press Foundation by selling a one-of-a-kind piece of NFT art.
Snowden commissioned the NFT art project, dubbed “Stay Free,” to honor a key 2020 court decision stating that the US National Security Agency’s mass spying breached the law. Snowden was instrumental in revealing the infractions, and the art piece includes every page of the landmark court decision, as well as a silhouette of Snowden’s face in the foreground.
Over the last decade, Snowden has become one of the most well-known government whistleblowers. Snowden obtained access and exposed sensitive material linked to NSA privacy abuses during his position as a former employee and subcontractor for the US Central Intelligence Agency.
A federal appeals court concluded seven years later that the NSA’s surveillance program, which collected data on Americans’ phone calls, was unconstitutional. After disclosing this material, Snowden was forced to seek asylum in Russia, where he was granted permanent status. For disclosing this information to the public, Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act.
Given the popularity of NFTs in 2021, it’s no surprise that Snowden’s “Stay Free” art work fetched such a high price at auction. PleasrDAO, which was founded by a group of NFT art collectors, purchased the NFT.
The group won the digital art work with a winning bid of 2,224.00 Ether (ETH). As the bidding for the “Stay Free” NFT heated up, Snowden remarked in a tweet that the final sum paid for the art piece was more than the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s yearly budget.
Gronk’s NFL Championship Series
Rob Gronkowski, an NFL veteran, is undoubtedly the most significant player to have had a successful NFT debut of digitally signed trading cards.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end debuted in the realm of NFTs in March, when he teamed up with OpenSea to create a collection of trading cards, which he sold for $1.8 million in ETH.
The Championship Series NFTs honor Gronkowski’s four NFL championships, while the fifth and final “Career Highlight Refractor Card” honors those four great seasons. Gronkowski won three NFL championships with the New England Patriots, and he won his fourth with quarterback Tom Brady after joining the Buccaneers in 2020.
The four Championship Cards had 87 digital editions up for auction, whereas the fifth Career Highlight card was just a single NFT.
Given this, it’s unsurprising that the one-of-a-kind “Career Highlight Refractor Card” sold for the most money at auction, fetching 229 ETH (about $435,000 at the time). The two-day auction resulted in the sale of 349 trading cards, as well as the one-of-a-kind Career highlight card, to 95 different owners. The auction’s entire trading value was 1,014 ETH, which was worth $1.8 million on the day.
Grimes’ $5.8 million in 20 minutes
Last but not least, Canadian musician and visual artist Claire Elise Boucher, better known by her stage name Grimes, had a successful NFT launch, with purchases of tokenized artwork totaling $5.8 million at the end of the sale in March 2021.
Grimes’ first NFT collection, nicknamed “WarNymph,” was designed by her brother, acclaimed digital artist Mac Boucher. The artwork depicted a fantasy universe focused on a goddess who was stylised as a baby angel. Carbon 180, a non-governmental organization dedicated to decreasing carbon emissions, received a portion of the revenues from the “WarNymph” NFT sales.
As previously stated, Grimes’ NFT work was in high demand, with copies selling for more than $5 million in less than 20 minutes after being public on Feb. 28. “Death of the Old,” the most expensive NFT, received a winning offer of $389,000.
It looks Like NFTs Are Here To Stay
NFTs have quickly outgrown their reputation as a novelty, and there appears to be widespread agreement that the field will continue to attract significant investment and use in the future.
It is apparent that tokenizing assets is becoming more widespread, from singers looking to push the bounds of their regular releases, such as Kings of Leon, who made $2 million from their NFT album release, to a $1.8 million pair of sneakers.
“I own some NFTs, but that is because I enjoy the art and the community that was developed to make the art,”
Mattison Asher, who does research on Ethereum, NFTs, and DeFi at ConsenSys, said at the time and added that it’s difficult to predict whether the prices paid for certain works of digital art and other NFTs will keep their worth in the future. However, beauty is in the perspective of the beholder, and the auction plainly demonstrates that people respect Beeple’s “The First 5000 Days.”
Asher, on the other hand, believes that sales like those of “Everydays” have played a larger part in bringing together businesses that appear to have more in common than meets the eye:
“The stories of crypto and Beeple are strikingly similar. Beeple, like the crypto sector as a whole, has had to overcome a tremendous amount of adversity in order to reach the current level of success. Beeple has been making digital works for years, much like the crypto industry as a whole, with little recognition.”
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