A Rare Pepe that pays tribute to the renowned writer and bitcoiner Andreas Antonopoulos was sold for USD 3,650,000 at an art auction in NFT format a few hours ago. The sale took place on the new web portal of the auction house Sotheby’s, originally from the United Kingdom.
This is the first auction organized in the virtual gallery Sotheby’s Metaverse, which started on the day 18 of this month and ended today. Collectibles were sold from Rare Pepe, Yuga Labs (Bored Ape), Larva Labs (CryptoPunks) and CryptoKitties, among other artists and creators of NFT products.
The sale that reached the highest value was the already reviewed work by Rare Pepe titled PEPENOPOULOS . This refers to Andreas Antonopoulos, writer of fundamental books for anyone passionate about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, such as: Mastering Bitcoin, The Internet of Money, Mastering Ethereum , etc. In CriptoNoticias we have presented some of his works previously translated into Spanish.
The most expensive Rare Pepe for several years was the Homer Pepe, based on the character from the animated series The Simpsons, Homer Simpson. The NFT reached 350,000 pepecash, a crypto asset native to the Rare Pepe ecosystem, which was equivalent to USD 39,200 in January 2018. In March 2021, that same NFT was sold for the equivalent of USD 320 thousand paid in ether (ETH), the Ethereum cryptocurrency.
Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yatch Club # 8817 artwork also surpassed three million US dollars in the current auction. Its final price was USD 3,388,000. As an ironic curiosity, anyone who had offered that amount of money on the launch day of the Bored Ape collection, in April of this year, could have bought all 10,000 existing copies. At that time they were sold for ETH 0.08 each, which is equivalent to USD 337, according to their current market price.
Sotheby’s and its foray into art NFT
Sotheby’s is a nearly 300-year-old British auction house. Having successfully auctioned several pieces of digital art in early 2021, they expressed their intention to further expand in this niche. Hence the idea of Sotheby’s Metaverse, a platform based on the Ethereum blockchain where works of art in NFT format are exhibited and auctioned.
The first collection of published pieces, whose auction period just finished, it was called Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors . It featured personalities such as Paris Hilton and DJ and music producer Steve Aoki ; who sold some works from their personal collections.
It is worth noting that the payments for this auction, although they could be made with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), they had to come from houses of exchange like Coinbase and Gemini, but not of purses guarded by the same owner. They also accepted fiat money and traditional payment methods.
