Thread by @pierskicks

1/ Today I pushed out a note to @Delphi_Digital subscribers covering the monumental milestone that this past weekend marked for #cryptoart with @beeple's @niftygateway drop.

delphidigital.io/reports/beeple…

2/ Legendary artist @beeple has spent the last 13 years of his life producing an artwork every single day. 4976 consecutive days of dedication eventually brought him to crypto art.

In just 48 hours, he sold over $3.5 million of digital artwork. 🤯

3/ There were three offerings:

- Open editions: ($969 fixed price, unlimited number, 5 minutes only)

- Limited editions: ($1 fixed price, 100 copies, unlimited time but sold out instantly)

- Single editions: (21 unique pieces sold in successive auctions over the weekend)

4/ Beeple was unusually quick to acclimatize to this new world, and made the largest splash to date with an elegant fusion of the digital and virtual worlds.

In doing so, he has also laid the foundations of a vibrant collector community with which he intends to further engage.

5/ All tokens (apart from the $1 editions) shipped with a physical counterpart containing: a digital display showing the NFT + QR code linked to data, titanium backplates with authentication markers, certificates of authenticity, and strangely, a hair sample from the man himself.

6/ These QR codes link to sections on @beeple's site where owners can, within reason, display whatever they please.

He says he is “really trying to build a community around this collection and have a lot of fun things planned for collectors".

beeple-collect.com/collections-1/…

7/ To provide at least some context on just how crazy the success of these auctions was, below is the cumulative year-to-date sales of @SuperRare—the leading crypto art platform that typically dominates by volume.

8/ It took all artist across the platform COMBINED over 11 months to achieve the same primary sale volume that took Beeple just 48 hours.

Read that again.

9/ It presents an opportunity to reflect on @niftygateway's drop model. Whilst their data is more opaque than other marketplaces, it suggests that a single, well-orchestrated famous artist drop can make up significant ground vs other marketplaces.

10/ Importantly, this is solely looking at primary sales when secondary market fees account for a reasonable portion of overall revenues. Unfortunately, Nifty Gateway does not yet allow us access to the data required to draw a meaningful comparison there.

11/ Clearly, pulling in more traditional artists with their own pre-existing audiences is a winning formula. We have now seen some of the most valuable crypto art in the world come from creators who we might regard as less “native” to this ecosystem.

12/ The demand for the individual pieces was astonishing.

We have seen a number of crypto artworks fetch north of $100K, but to see 17 out of 21 pieces do so in a single drop is pretty groundbreaking. The final 1/1 artwork alone fetched $777,777.77 from @illestrater_!

13/ The winning bidder of the final piece provided some brief comments, which once again highlighted the shared feeling of being part of something special often mentioned by the crypto art community.

https://twitter.com/illestrater_/status/1338324865351176192?s=20

14/ Now, naysayers have suggested that it’s very hard to prove the legitimacy of some of these eye watering sales across in #cryptoart.

There could, in theory, be collusion between large whales and even platform operators to boost sale prices & optics of this space.

15/ Any such suggestions have to remain pure speculation for now.

In time, as price history is developed on the ultra-rare pieces we will be able to use chain analysis to track patterns of activity across top collectors and generate insights into this theory.

16/ Judging by the fervour one can observe in any hobbyist crypto art collector, I’m reasonably confident at least the majority of this demand is legitimate.

17/ That being said, enthusiasm could probably be tempered somewhat. The floor price for the $1 Beeple editions appears to have already been set around $5,000 on Nifty Gateway’s secondary market…

Also 👀 the 117x flip in just over 2 days.

https://twitter.com/niftygateway/status/1338133016649101320

18/ Needless to say, it has been a monumental year for #cryptoart more broadly. It seems to be the earliest NFT niche to have found meaningful product-market fit and continues to draw in world-class talent from various creative realms.

19/ Heading into 2021, the opening comments from my October report remain worthy of consideration: “With interest in crypto art exploding and the advent of yield farming within NFT protocols, we are expecting fireworks in the coming months for these platforms as the battle for...

20/ ..market share really heats up. It’s anticipated that other exchanges will launch initiatives similar to Raribles liquidity mining of a governance token after seeing their results and the wider DeFi space implementing these kinds of incentives.”

delphidigital.io/reports/crypto…