Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000152 · Crypto & Web3 → Crypto collapses → NFT bubble and collapse · 2021
Everydays: the First 5000 Days
$69 million NFT sale tied to a collapsed token scheme
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“$69.3 million in Ether for a JPEG, paid by a man whose own tokens went up while the news reported it.”
Why Noah said no
Beeple stitched 5,000 daily drawings into one image, and its NFT sold at Christie's for $69.3 million in March 2021 to a buyer who also held the B20 tokens tied to it. The Non-fungible token entry already covers that boom, and CryptoPunks covers the sale where the buyer was in on it.
- Rejected
- 28 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 9.7 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everydays:_the_First_5000_Days
What it is
A digital collage of 5000 images created by Beeple over 13 years, sold as an NFT at Christie's in March 2021 for $69.3 million. The buyer and seller both held stakes in B20 tokens, which spiked during media coverage of the auction and then collapsed.
Why it’s internet culture
The sale showed how the NFT boom of 2021 attracted both genuine believers in digital ownership and people willing to use hype and speculation to inflate related assets. The collapse exposed how easily the market could be manipulated when insiders had stakes in both sides of a transaction.
The 2021 Beeple sale was the moment most people first heard the word NFT, and it showed how a headline price could be used to pump tokens held by the people on both sides of the deal.
What Noah read
Everydays: the First 5000 Days is a digital work of art created by Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple. The work is a collage of 5000 digital images created by Winkelmann for his Everydays series. Its associated non-fungible token (NFT) was sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in 2021, making it the most expensive NFT ever. Composition Winkelmann was inspired by British artist Tom Judd and began the daily project on 1 May 2007. Some of the images involve figures from pop culture, including Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump, and are arranged chronologically. Some of the earlier images are hand-drawn and not computer-produced. In an article published to Artnet, art critic Ben Davis asserted that some of the 5,000 images comprising the work revealed various racial, misogynistic, and homophobic stereotypes, and that the collection in general was uninteresting and of poor artistic quality. Will Gompertz considered Winkelmann a "talented exponent" of the comic book aesthetic, and compared his work to Hieronymus Bosch and Philip Guston. He predicted that the work would be regarded "either as the moment before the short-lived cryptoart bubble burst, or as the first chapter in a new…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Beeple stitched 5,000 daily drawings into one image, and its NFT sold at Christie's for $69.3 million in March 2021 to a buyer who also held the B20 tokens tied to it. The Non-fungible token entry already covers that boom, and CryptoPunks covers the sale where the buyer was in on it.”