The NFT Boom — Beeple's Work Sells for $69.3 Million at Christie's

An NFT (non-fungible token) is a token recorded on a blockchain that can be told apart from every other one. On 11 March 2021, "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" by the digital artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold in an online Christie's auction for $69,346,250. Before the sale, Christie's had described it as an important milestone in the development of the market for digital art.

This article offers no investment guidance and makes no price predictions. It sets out what an NFT is technically, where it came from, and how trading moved after the boom, with sources and dates.

What an NFT is

One bitcoin is indistinguishable from another; units can be swapped one for one, which is what fungible means. An NFT is the opposite: each token is treated as distinct. NFTs usually contain a reference to a file — an artwork, photo, video or audio recording — and their owner can transfer them to someone else.

As Wikipedia summarises, however, ownership of an NFT as recorded on a blockchain has no inherent legal meaning. It does not necessarily confer copyright or other intellectual-property rights in the associated file, it does not stop the file being shared or copied, and it does not prevent other NFTs being made that refer to the same file.

Background: CryptoPunks and ERC-721

Most NFTs have been created on Ethereum. What Larva Labs calls the prototype for NFTs as we know them is CryptoPunks.

Larva Labs recalls that when it made CryptoPunks in 2017 the term NFT did not exist, and that it built its own system by modifying the commonly used standard for fungible tokens. Claiming a punk was free; the only cost was the network fee.

The ERC-721 proposal describes itself as "A standard interface for non-fungible tokens, also known as deeds." Its reasoning was that the fungible-token standard ERC-20 was insufficient for tracking NFTs, because each such asset is distinct.

11 March 2021: a single-lot sale at Christie's

Christie's describes the sale as the first time a major auction house had offered a purely digital work of art, also known as an NFT. Al Jazeera reported that bidding started at $100. According to the Christie's press release it cites, 91% of the 33 active bidders were new to Christie's, and millennial and Generation X buyers made up the majority. Christie's said the result placed Beeple among the three most valuable living artists and called it a watershed moment in the development of digital art. It had also announced that it would accept the cryptocurrency Ether as payment.

2022: the slump in trading

The boom did not last, though how it looks depends on what is measured and over what period. The figures that the analytics firm DappRadar gave Decrypt (in an article of 4 January 2023) exclude trades suspected of being wash trades.

The annual total was roughly flat only because the start of the year was so strong; according to Decrypt, OpenSea, the largest marketplace, alone recorded a record $5 billion month in January 2022. Crypto prices fell faster in May amid the collapse of Terra's LUNA and UST, and NFT trading followed. More trades at a flat total means lower prices per trade.

Dollar volume kept shrinking. Reporting DappRadar's figures for the second quarter of 2025, Decrypt (4 July 2025) put trading volume at $823 million across 12.5 million sales.

Criticism and open questions

Wikipedia summarises the criticism that NFTs have drawn: their use as speculative investments, the energy cost and carbon footprint of some blockchains, and their use in art scams. On energy, Ethereum, where most NFTs sit, abandoned computation-based consensus in September 2022, and Ethereum's side says this cut its electricity use sharply (see Ethereum).

NFTs spread as a way of attaching a "this is one of a kind" record to something digital. What that record means in law remains a question separate from the technology. The wider story of moving value over the network is on the internet and web timeline.