How Legendary Auction House Christie's Embraced NFTs After Beeple's Million Sale
28 November 2023
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At the beginning of 2021, NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, were a niche technology mainly known to tech enthusiasts.
However, by spring, they were a global phenomenon, largely due to a significant event in March of that year.
Digital artist Mike "Beeple" Winkelmann's Ethereum NFT work, "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," was sold for an astonishing $69.3 million at a Christie's auction.
This sale not only transformed public understanding of NFTs but also drastically changed the operations of the auction house behind it.
Christie’s, a 257-year-old institution known for handling masterwork paintings and historical artifacts, found itself at the forefront of a new technological frontier.
The auction house capitalized on this lead by creating Christie’s Ventures, a tech-focused venture capital arm, and Christie’s 3.0, an Ethereum NFT art marketplace.
Since its inception, Christie’s 3.0 has auctioned on-chain works from digital-native artists and on-chain versions of works from traditional artists.
This has given credibility to the emerging on-chain fine art market, backed by one of the world's most respected art brands.
However, Christie's transition into the intersection of art and technology was not a planned move but rather a fortunate accident.
Christie's Digital Art Director Nicole Sales Giles recalls they had "zero expectations" when they put Beeple's work up for auction.
However, the record-breaking sale price made them realize they had stumbled upon something much larger than a single auction.
Christie's clientele also began inquiring about how to leverage NFTs as a new asset class, solidifying the auction house's decision to pursue this new venture.
Despite the team's unfamiliarity with blockchain technology, they successfully created a fully blockchain-native digital auction platform that aligned with the Christie's brand.
The team insisted on a fully on-chain auction mechanism as a testament to Christie’s 3.0's commitment to blockchain-backed art.
Since its launch in October 2022, Christie’s 3.0 has served as an experimental space for the auction house, featuring a diverse range of artists and auction structures.
In the aftermath of the Beeple sale, Christie's also ventured into new sectors entirely.
This led to the creation of Christie’s Ventures, a tech-focused VC firm, which has invested in seven projects across various sectors including blockchain technology, AI, FinTech, SaaS, and hardware.
Christie's Ventures is seen as a unique entry point into one of the world's leading art institutions and represents Christie's commitment to staying relevant as their clients adopt new technologies. Read more here.
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Christie's Changed Public Perception Of Digital Art Assets. How Can Zucoin Make It Easier?
Mike "Beeple" Winkelmann's Ethereum NFT work at a Christie's auction selling for $69.3 million changed public perception of NFTs and brought Christie's, an institution that has been around for centuries, to the cutting edge of this new technological frontier.
Zucoin, a digital asset with unique Splitchain technology, is working to make the process of creating and trading smart assets, of which NFTs are a subset, easier.
For example, with the Zutopia marketplace, users will be eventually able to trade all kinds of different Zucoin-based digital assets on the peer-to-peer marketplace.
In future, the Splitchain network and the Zutopia marketplace could provide tools for quicker, more efficient, and environmentally friendly solutions allowing artists and institutions to settle art transactions amongst themselves.
It's just one of the many directions and capabilities the system could be applied to.
With permissionless and decentralized systems, as Splitchain is working to become more so, the ability to build such things will be opened up to all.
Just as Christie's has embraced the future, so does Zucoin, ready to unlock a world of opportunities.
Baby steps first though.
Initial focus is to get the core Zutopia marketplace functioning to the level users expect, which is what the Zutopia team is doing at the moment.
Splitchain supports various kinds of data inside of a transaction, positioning it as a much easier platform to work with.
For example, compared with other popular blockchains, there are no new computer programming languages for developers to learn with Splitchain.
This expands the pool of developers with existing skillsets who can work with Splitchain.
This is key and sounds obvious, but it's a friction point missed by most other blockchain platforms.
Furthermore, Zucoin’s Splitchain network eliminates energy-intensive mining and slow settlement processes, a particular area of interest for environmentally aware artists and buyers in the NFT space.
Many popular blockchains are currently struggling to scale with the bandwidth stresses caused by digital assets, such as NFTs, on their networks.
Splitchain's approach to network scaling is very, very different from traditional blockchains.
Zucoin is spending a lot of time working on a unique way to scale the Splitchain network and we'll have more news to report when the time comes—make sure you've subscribed to this newsletter.
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All the best,
—Rob
MyZucoins
Disclaimer: Of course, this is not advice, financial or otherwise. It’s also important to consider the risks and challenges associated with any potential benefits.