In a landmark announcement today, leading auction house Christie’s will break into a new territory for auctions. Christie’s will be the first of it’s kind to auction off a lot of NFTs with live bidding in Ethereum. The auction will be centered around Art Blocks Curated, a growing NFT series joining the ranks of some of the most sought-after NFTs to date.
Let’s take a look at what we know from the recent news.
Christie’s: Breaking Ground
We’ve seen a growing amount of NFTs go for auction on premier auction platforms such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s lately. Christie’s of course, first made headlines left and right for the $69MM sale of Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” earlier this year. Additionally, the auction house has gone on to build out “Christie’s Encrypted,” a subsection dedicated towards NFTs.
In a tweet on the official Christie’s Twitter, the auction house announced that an October auction will be host to the sale of Art Blocks Curated: Sets 1-3. The sets will be part of a broader ‘Post-War to Present’ auction series. Also aptly noted is that “bidding for this lot will be conducted live in ETH – a first for any leading auction house.”
We have seen the likes of CryptoPunks go up for auction on major auction houses with bidding that supported ETH payments, however this listing will seemingly be the first time that live bidding will be ETH-first.
Leave your USD behind and pack up your crypto wallet for this one.
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New Kids On The ArtBlock
We covered a high-level primer on Art Blocks just a few weeks ago. Since then, they have continued to hold ground. Art Blocks have yielded over half a billion dollars in sales in the past thirty days, securing a firm positioning atop the NFT charts in terms of sales volume – second to only Axie Infinity.
Art Blocks have led a wave of generative art that many NFT projects are now tailing. The most notable NFTs in the Art Blocks umbrella are Chromie Squiggles. Squiggles are part of the Curated subset that Art Blocks brings to market, and are likely to be a featured piece of Christie’s upcoming listing next month. As we review in the aforementioned primer, Squiggles have become the predominant face behind Art Blocks.
Art Blocks will likely be the first of many more auctions to come for Christie’s that are Ethereum-first when it comes to bidding. What a time for NFTs.
Ethereum will be the primary bidding tool in next month's NFT series on Christie's, "Art Blocks Curated: Sets 1-3." | Source: ETH-USD on TradingView.com
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Featured image from Pexels, Charts from TradingView.com