Have you ever heard that a digital image got sold in crores? No right! But this time you will be surprised to know that for the first time in the world, a digital image was auctioned and the artist who created it sold it for a whopping amount of Rs 501 crore.
"Everydays - The First 5000 Days" is a digital work by American artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple. It is a collage of 5,000 individual images, which were made one-per-day over more than thirteen years, reported news agency Reuters.
The auctioneer Christie's conducted the auction where this JPEG file of Digital artist Beeple was auctioned for $69 million or Rs 501 crore. Such digital images are also called NFT which is a digital artwork that is made unique using blockchain. It is bought and sold through cryptocurrency.
Beeple, a digital artist, creates such images every day. Christie bid for his 500 digital image file. Christie announced last month that it would bid for Beeple's digital file (The First 5000 Days). Actually, beeples have produced such digital pictures every day since 2007, they are combined for 5000 days. This is the first time that an auctioneer institution has bid completely for digital work.
These have been bought and sold using the popular cryptocurrency Ethereum, which is priced at approximately Rs. 1.3 lakh per ETH. In fact, this is one of the times where Christie's was accepting payments in cryptocurrency — a note on its page for the auction read: "Please note that you may elect to make payment of the purchase price for this lot in the cryptocurrency Ether. Payment in Ether must be made via a digital wallet transfer of Ether to Christie's."
