The New York Times sold a crypto art piece for more than half a million dollars in a 24-hour auction on Thursday. The piece created as a non-fungible token, or NFT, was a part of a project by the publication making light of how people have begun selling art and memes as NFTs for seemingly absurd sums of money, reports Business Insider.
The publication made its NFT a copy of a writer’s column titled “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!” The Times’ tech columnist Kevin Roose presented the NFT as an experiment, after which an anonymous user known online as 3FMusic made the winning bid on The New York Times’ NFT at more than $560,000 worth of ether, a popular cryptocurrency for selling NFTs.
“As I watched these riches change hands, I thought to myself: Why should celebrities, athletes, and artists have all the fun? Why can’t a journalist join the NFT party, too,” Roose wrote in his column.
He put the crypto art piece online at a minimum price of $800 and saw the digital asset triple in value within a matter of hours.
Over the past few months, crypto art pieces have sold for millions of dollars, accounting for over $1 billion in sales, according to data from CryptoSlam. Public figures including artist Grimes and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have made millions selling their own digital assets.
The news has come with a rapid rise in the sale of random digital items at exorbitant prices. The Twitter CEO’s first-ever tweet is being sold for $2.9 million, and a JPG by a digital artist creating a new record by being sold for a price of $69 million.
Source: Business Insider
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