Beeple: How This Man Gets Almost $70 Million From NFT 'Crypto Art'

Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist who goes by the name Beeple, made history when an NFT of his work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" sold for $69 million at an online auction on March 11, 2021.

Six months before the monumental sale, Beeple's art had ever only sold for $100.

Beeple's arts had indeed helped to pave the way for the popularity of NFTs to explode.

Beeple's Rise to Digital Art Fame

In an interview with Insider on March 16, Beeple shared that he initially never thought his work would sell until people urged him to "look at this NFT thing."

Beeple launched the first series of NFTs in October 2020 and sold a pair for $66,666.66 each. In December 2020, his series of works sold for a total of $3.5 million. Then, in February 2021, one of his first NFT art, which sold for $66,666.66, was resold for $6.6 million.

"If everybody wants it, well, then it has value," he explained.

Talking about "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," his most expensive art to date worth almost $70 million, Beeple shared that he thought of creating a collage of all the "Everyday" images he produced since May 1, 2007.

All these successes started to materialize when Beeple turned his attention to learn more about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs by the time the pandemic struck, causing his business to slow down.

However, Beeple thinks that the sale of his NFT-minted digital art had been hugely misunderstood.

"I think that people don't understand that when you buy, you have the token. You can display the token and show you own the token, but, you don't own the copyright," he said.

Is NFT a Bubble? Beeple Shares His Thoughts

Speaking to an interview with Fox News Sunday, which was posted on Twitter on March 21, Beeple shared that the whole NFT craze is a "bubble."

"I absolutely think it's a bubble, to be quite honest," he said. "There was a bubble. And the bubble burst. And it wiped out a lot of crap-but it didn't wipe out the Internet. And so the technology itself is strong enough where I think it's going to outlive that."

Earlier, in his interview with CNBC published on March 12, Beeple said that he thinks the technology itself has so many use cases even beyond digital art.

He added that he looks at NFTs like a blank slate, and its value is purely speculative at this time.

People who wish to prove ownership in today's digital world can utilize the technology and have everyday things such as legal documents minted as an NFT.

To put it simply, NFTs can be used to record the ownership of assets on a digital ledger similar to the networks that support cryptocurrencies.

In NFTs' case, that digital ledger would be the Etherium blockchain.

For now, the focus of NFTs revolves around digital art, memes, music, and sports plays.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Lee Mercado