The revered auction house began offering NFTs for sale late last year.
Several NFTs from three of today’s most popular collections—Bored Apes, Meebits, and CryptoPunks—will be available for bidding at a Christie’s auction later this month.
The information was confirmed by a specialist at Christie’s to Decrypt. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are collectibles based on blockchain technology that can be purchased and sold as proof of ownership for files stored on the internet.
Christie’s sold its first NFT, as well as a physical sculpture that corresponded to it, in the previous year. Sensing an emerging market (as well as competition from Sotheby’s), the auction house has only continued to expand its digital asset operations since that time. Christie’s auction house sold a digital artist Beeple’s non-objective sculpture for $69 million in March.
CryptoPunks, a collection of pixelated mugshots attached to NFTs, are among the oldest and most coveted cryptographic art experiments still in existence today.
Each has a unique set of characteristics, some of which are more rare and valuable than others; for example, one might have blue skin, while another might be wearing a cap or smoking a cigarette.
Currently, the cheapest CryptoPunk NFT costs more than $100,000, according to this morning’s prices. Some have sold for as much as $7 million dollars.
Christie’s auction house sold a group of CryptoPunks for approximately $17 million in May.
Meebits are a generative cryptographic art project developed by Larva Labs, the same developers who created CryptoPunks.
Moreover, Bored Ape Yacht Club is the logical successor to CryptoPunks, serving as a new iteration of the same formula. In a recent column in The New Yorker, a writer discussed the collection in detail.
The NFTs for the upcoming auction are all from a single-owner collection, though Christie’s did not reveal who owned them or where they came from.
The auction will take place in the auction house’s Hong Kong saleroom in late September, according to the schedule.
