Do you remember the 'Antique Roadshow?' It was a television program about people who would dig up pieces of artwork and other artifacts from their attics and bring them to an appraisal expert. Usually, the pieces that they would bring in would fetch a few hundred dollars at most, but every once in a while, someone would really hit the jackpot.
Something similar recently happened to an NFT art collector, albeit on a much shorter time scale.
Edward Fairchild, who Co-founded an LA-based cannabis company called THC Design, recently discovered that an NFT he had purchased from “Beeple,” the darling of the digital art-world, had exploded in value. Fairchild purchased the work for $969 in December 2020; today, it is worth $300,000, which is a rise of roughly 30,000 percent.
Fairchild told Business Insider on March 14th that although he was a fan of Beeple’s work, “I had no idea what an NFT was and I'd never heard of Nifty Gateway [...] I really didn't see the point.” Nifty Gateway is the NFT market on which many of Beeple’s works have been sold.
“I Had No Idea That Spending $969 on a Work of Art Would, within Three Months, Turn into an Asset Valued around $300,000.”
Remarkably, Fairchild was unaware of the recent “NFT boom.”
“I had no idea that spending $969 on a work of art would, within three months, turn into an asset valued around $300,000,” Fairchild said, adding that he thought he was hoping to sell the NFT for 100% profit within the next few years.
However, Fairchild recently discovered that another copy of the same work, dubbed The Infected Culture, had sold for $288,000. Fairchild has since listed his copy of the work for an even higher price on Nifty Gateway: $1.698 million.
“Even for that price, I still wonder if I should pull it off the market and just keep it for a few years...it seemed like a realistic estimate of the near-term value of the piece,” Fairchild explained.
According to Business Insider, there are multiple copies of The Infected Culture. Each NFT came with “a physical element,” in the form of “a sleek digital display screen, encased in acrylic” that loops a GIF image of the artwork. Beeple also threw in a piece of his own hair with the work with the disclaimer that it is “definitely not pubes.”
On March 11th, one of Beeple’s works, entitled 'Everydays' for a record-setting $69 million on an NFT marketplace called 'MakersPlace'. A number of other musicians and artists have also made eye-popping figures through NFT sales, including American DJ 3LAU and Canadian musician Grimes.
