Sotheby’s sold a bunch of “Bored Ape” NFTs for $24.4 million in an online auction

In March, Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, made history after a single piece of his non-fungible token (NFT) art print was sold at Christie’s Auction for a record-setting $69.3 million, making it the most expensive digital art ever sold. Then in April, the NFT bubble bursts as prices plunge by 70% in just one month. We even predicted the end of NFT. But we were wrong.

Fast forward four months later, the NFT market rallied back as several institutional investors and companies like payments giant Visa jumped into the digital asset market. The NFT market is so hot right now that even a 12-year-old coder was able to earn over $400,000 in less than 2 months selling NFTs. But that’s nothing compared to recent NFT sales by Sotheby’s, one of the world’s largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewelry, and collectibles.

Today, auction house Sotheby’s reported it has sold a set of 107 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from Bored Ape Yacht Club for $24.4 million in an online sale. The second set of 101 Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs sold for $1.8 million. The images were part of the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” collection of NFTs – a set of 10,000 computer-generated cartoon apes, made by the U.S.-based company Yuga Labs. Owners of the ape NFTs become members of an online club.

The sale is a further reminder that we now live in an insane world where people spend millions of dollars on JPEG files that could potentially be worthless in a few years. Back in June, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam warned that 90% of NFTs will be worthless in 3 to 5 years.

In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Ehrsam drew parallels between the rise of cryptocurrencies and the dot-com boom of the 1990s. “I go so far as to say that 90% of NFTs produced, they probably will have little to no value in three to five years,” Ehrsam said. “You could say the same thing about early internet companies in the late ’90s.” He added that NFTs are no different than any other crypto project born out of the hype overnight.

“People are going to try all sorts of things. There’ll be millions and millions of cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets, just like there were millions and millions of websites. Most of them won’t work,” Ehrsam explained.

NFT (non-fungible token) is a type of cryptographic token on a blockchain that represents a unique digital asset. This asset can either be entirely digital assets or tokenized versions of real-world assets. Because NFTs are not interchangeable with each other, they may function as proof of authenticity and ownership within the digital realm, for example as proof of the authenticity of rare art. NFT is a special type of token that lives on the Ethereum blockchain and proves digital ownership of its associated media.