As the hype of non-fungible tokens accelerates at an expedited pace, it’s a no wonder why we’re seeing a number of NFT’s sell for millions and millions. Last year, 41-year-old artist, Mike Winkelmann, who is more commonly known as Beeple, sold “Everydays: First 5,000 Days” for $69.34 million in March of 2021— the most expensive piece of digital art today. Most recently CryptoPunks has sold Punk #5822 for a whopping 8,000 ETH or $23.7 million making it the most expensive of the CryptoPunk collection.
Saturday February 12th’s sale of CryptoPunk’s super rare Alien NFT is the fourth highest sale of an NFT to date. While a number of CryptoPunks collection have sold for millions, CryptoPunks has exceeded its previous highest sale of $11.8 million, set last June, and sold their most recent NFT at $23.4 million. Their NFT collection includes several other rare punks, such as the more common Ape and Zombies. The Alien however considered quite valuable, as it’s much more scarce. Punk #5822 is 1 of 9 of the Alien Punks, in a collection of 10,000 avatars. It last sold in July 2017 for just $1,600, which now seems like a deal.
Who is the new owner of this insanely rare NFT you might wonder? It’s no other that Deepak Thapliyal, the CEO of cloud blockchain infrastructure firm chain. Thapliyal shared that he used leverage via DeFi protocol Compound Finance to purchase the extremely rare Alien Avatar NFT. He purchased directly from CryptoPunks developer Lara Labs marketplace. This solidified many of the other holders of crypto punks and made them wonder how much their NFTs would be worth in the near and long term future.
As we continue to see growing interest in the metaverse, crypto and NFT community, we can’t help but want to be apart of it. FOMO is a real thing. Celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Eminem, and Gwenyth Paltrow have all shown interest in the NFT world. As celebrities continue to gain interest in NFT’s, naturally people are going to know more and more about non-fungible tokens and want to buy them. This chain reaction could mean that their values only continue to go up.
Skeptics will soon see that that the world of NFT’s and Crypto is just getting started and is here to stay. This year has just begun and we’re already seeing some insane NFT’s selling for millions, and we are most likely to see more sales in the year of 2022.