Major auction house Sotheby’s has completed its cryptocurrency-enabled auction offering Banksy’s iconic protest artwork “Love is in the Air.” According to the auction results, Sotheby’s sold the physical artwork on Wednesday for $12.9 million, significantly up from the originally estimated $3 million to $5 million. The physical artwork was offered at a Contemporary Art Evening Auction that also featured “Versus Medici” by Jean-Michel Basquiat selling for nearly $51 million. Sotheby’s announced on Twitter that the auction involved a 14-minute bidding battle among four entities. The auction house emphasized that the sale marks the first time cryptocurrency was accepted as a …

Despite the cooling of the recent NFT frenzy, prized nonfungible tokens with historical significance are still fetching multi-million-dollar prices. On Wednesday, famed New York-based auction house Christie’s tweeted that an auction for nine tokens from pioneering NFT CryptoPunks had cleared for nearly $17 million combined. Despite the tokens fetching millions, some Twitter users speculated that the winning bidder scored a bargain. I thought they'd go for more myself also. — VeryBadAcid (@acid_very) May 12, 2021 CryptoPunks were launched by LarvaLabs in 2017 and were limited to 10,000 tokens in total. The NFTs depict randomly generated pixelated portraits, with unique features …

Online marketplace eBay has introduced auctions for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, to its platform. According to a Reuters report, eBay users who meet certain criteria on the platform will be permitted to list NFTs. The company added that it would expand its policies and tools surrounding digital collectibles in the future. "In the coming months, eBay will add new capabilities that bring blockchain-driven collectibles to our platform," said eBay's North America senior vice president, Jordan Sweetnam. The report comes almost exactly one week after CEO Jamie Iannone said the platform would be "exploring opportunities" to enable NFTs on the platform …

An ecosystem that allows nonfungible tokens to be backed by physical items has entered into a partnership with Enjin. Uniqly describes itself as a “bridge between virtual nonfungible tokens and real-world goods” — and aims to solve one of the last hurdles that the NFT sector faces. CryptoPunks, FC Barcelona fan tokens and $70 million Beeple collages are strictly digital, meaning you can’t hang them on a wall, wear them on your chest, or display them in a museum. But the NFTs on offer from Uniqly can be redeemed for something tangible, meaning these digital assets can be materialized and …

Sotheby’s, one of the world’s oldest and biggest auction houses, has announced that it will be accepting major cryptocurrencies as a new payment method at an upcoming auction. Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart said that the company will debut Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) payments as part of its upcoming auction of Banksy’s "Love is in the Air." The new payment method will be facilitated in partnership with United States’ largest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, noted Stewart in a Tuesday interview with CNBC's Squawk Box. “It’s something we have been thinking about for quite some time,” the CEO said, elaborating that Sotheby’s …

Major online marketplace eBay will be pursuing crypto payment options for its customers along with exploring ways to introduce nonfungible tokens on the platform. In an interview with CNBC today, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone said the company will "continue to look" at payment options like crypto. In addition, he said eBay will be "exploring opportunities" to enable nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, on the platform "in an easy way," comparing the digital offerings to collectibles. “One of the great things about eBay is when there’s a new trend, it just shows up on eBay,” said Iannone. “That’s what we’re seeing in …

Playboy centerfolds will be sold as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, after the classic men’s magazine announced a partnership with Nifty Gateway on Tuesday. The entertainment and lifestyle brand — famous for its Playboy Bunnies, distinctive logo and the dubious claim that men “only read it for the articles” — is planning to tokenize its art, cartoon and photography archive built up over 67 years, as well as release new original artworks. In a Tuesday announcement, the brand did not reveal specific details for its NFT drops on Nifty, but it did state its plans to “support emerging and underrepresented artists …

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are “10 times better than their physical counterparts,” according to digital art collector MetaKovan. The pseudonymous art patron, who was recently revealed to be blockchain entrepreneur Vingaresh Sundaresan, bought the NFT of Beeple’s "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" for $69 million earlier this year. Explaining the motives behind his purchase in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, MetaKovan pointed out that NFTs have a number of advantages over traditional artworks: They are easy to transfer, they don’t have any storage costs and their ownership can be shared. Also, they can democratize the art world by making it …

Musician Adel Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, is set to release his first nonfungible token, or NFT, via Nifty Gateway on Saturday. He follows in the footsteps of other musicians such as Kings of Leon, Grimes, Rico Nasty and Ja Rule who recognize the ability of NFTs to put the power (and the dollars) back into the hands of artists. Excited to announce that my first NFT drop is taking place on Saturday at 2:00 pm EST on @niftygateway. The collection will feature new music and limited edition art. I developed the artwork with Strange Loop Studios pic.twitter.com/627BO4JekK — …

Having just sold a column as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for half a million dollars, The New York Times is now wondering if the whole scene is in a bit of a bubble. In a Tuesday article, "Art’s NFT Question: Next Frontier in Trading, or a New Form of Tulip?," author Scott Reyburn questions the sustainability of the current NFT bubble and draws comparisons to the Dutch “tulip mania” of the 1630s. Tulip mania, for anyone who doesn’t hodl flowers, was a market bubble in the Netherlands that saw prices for a single tulip bulb rocket up to a …

If creative self-doubt and competition between humans in the art world weren’t already hard enough, artists now face the prospect of battling it out on Nifty Gateway with artistic robots. Sophia, the world-famous humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, has generated more than $1 million in sales from her debut NFT drop on Nifty Gateway. The “Andrea Bonaceto and Sophia the Robot drop” was launched in collaboration with contemporary artist Andrea Bonaceto. The drop included tokenized portrait GIFs that morphed from artist Andre Bonaceto’s paintings into Sophia’s artworks. The portraits depicted figures involved in her development such as …

Italian copyright collecting agency Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori, SIAE, has minted more than four million NFTs on the Algorand blockchain to digitally represent the rights of more than 95,000 authors. The partnership between SIAE and Algorand started in 2019, with SIAE aiming to digitize its entire copyright database to help decentralize the management of the metadata. NFTs will eventually provide copyright owners such as authors and publishers with royalty streams to their work. The tokenization of the articles and published works will allow the system “to transfer management directly to rights holders, who will then be able to …