Sotheby’s rakes in $100m from NFT sales in 2021
Entering the NFT game has paid off big time for auction house Sotheby’s which raised almost $100m through sales in 2021.
The almost 300-year-old art institution raised a total of $7.3bn from art sales this year with the total boosted by the meteoric rise of NFTs. Sotheby’s launched an in-house Metaverse platform, an NFT marketplace, which helped the company make in-roads into a new market with 78 per cent of NFT bidders new clients of the auction house and over half under 40.
The auction house held its first NFT sale in April and raked in $16.8m from 3,000 buyers who purchased works by digital artist Pak.
Among its notable sales, a bundle of NFTs Bored Ape Yacht Club fetched $24.4m and set a record for the biggest single lot sold online at the auction house. An NFT of the world wide web source code has raised $5.3m whilst a rare CryptoPunk sold for $11.8m.
The NFT marketplace has exploded over the past year, with sales totalling $10.7bn in the third quarter. In recent months the NFT space has attracted the attention of major brands including Adidas, Nike and Boohoo.
This week Nike snapped up an NFT fashion start up, Adidas announced it will launch its first range of NFT products tomorrow and BoohooMAN dropped a collection of digital fashion tokens.
This year Sotheby’s also accepted digital assets at auction for the first time with an auctioneer accepting bids for physical artworks in the currency Ether (ETH).
Read more: Nike snaps up NFT fashion start up RTFKT in metaverse push