NFT Art: From $69 Million to $10,000

🔥 In the spring of 2021, the world stood still: Beeple’s digital artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold at Christie’s for a staggering $69.3 million. It was the moment when NFTs seemed like the new “internet of art,” and digital collectors — the heroes of the future.

The buyer was investor Vignesh Sundaresan (aka Metakovan), who declared at the time: “This is the beginning of a new era of digital democracy in art.” But a few years later, the market looks very different. According to crypto analyst EthanDG, the current estimated value of this NFT is about $10,000. Yes, that’s not a typo: six zeros less than its auction price.

What happened? Both simple and complex things at once. NFTs stopped being the “embodiment of innovation” and turned into a hype bubble. The technology remains, but the crowd’s excitement has vanished. What once seemed like a new Renaissance turned out to be a phantom of the cheap-money and crypto-euphoria era.

From Beeple to Justin Sun’s Banana

A similar story surrounds Justin Sun, the head of Tron, who in 2022 purchased an art object called “the banana” — literally duct-taped to a wall — for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Symbolic, isn’t it? In the NFT era, even a banana could become a token. But when art turns into a financial instrument, its meaning inevitably fades.

The Technology Stays, the Hype Fades

More importantly, the NFT technology itself hasn’t disappeared. The market is simply maturing. If tokenization used to serve hype, it is now being applied in gaming, property rights, music, and digital identity. NFTs are evolving from a crypto-artist toy into the foundation of future Web3 ecosystems, where every digital item — from a ticket to a passport — can be unique and blockchain-secured.

📌 Conclusion

Beeple may have sold not just a picture, but a symbol of an era. NFTs have traveled from gold rush to sobering reality — from $69 million to $10,000 — but such cycles are what cleanse markets.
History repeats itself: the internet, dot-coms, crypto — all began with madness. Real value emerges later, when a technology stops being trendy and starts being truly needed.