Put another win on the board. NFT artist Pak’s collaboration with famed auction house Sotheby’s has sold for $16.8 million.
NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are blockchain-minted digital artworks with unique encryption codes. Their sole code allows for verified authenticity and ownership within the digital work. While an NFT can be anything, from a digital art piece, song, or whole album, Pak has highly focused his own work within the digital arts.
Characterized by monochromatic pieces with geometric shapes, Pak consistently ranks among the top NFT artists sold (number two at press time). Sotheby's featured the mystery-artist's “The Fungible” collection, a series of “open edition” 15-minute sale slots exploring society’s understanding of value and our relationship to it.
See also: Pak & Sotheby's Open Historic 'The Fungible' NFT Auction
The "Open Editions" auction made headlines for Pak’s new approach to bidding. Over the course of three days, NiftyGateway and Sotheby’s would open bidding for “The Fungible” for a limited amount of time, allowing bidders and collectors to purchase as many fungible cubes for a fixed price.
Wildly successful, about 19,740 cubes across eight tiers were sold in the first day’s 15-minute sales window, yielding $9.87 million on day one alone, Bloomberg
While a cube on day one was sold for $500, by day two, the same cube was sold for $1,000. A total of 3,268 pieces were sold across all eight levels for a total of $3.3 million. By the third day, cube prices tripled to $1,500, selling 593. In total, the three-day limited sale brought 3,080 unique buyers who spent about $14 million on 23,598 cubes.
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Pak also released a series of exclusive pieces to be gifted to the top collectors. “Complexity,” a piece to celebrate the value of relationships between collector and creator, is reserved for the top 100 bidders by the end of the third day. “The Cube,” a unique one-of-one NFT will be given to the individual who purchases the most Open Edition pieces by the end of the auction.
Other than gifting NFTs based on collector status, Pak also separated four pieces in “Equilibrium,” a four-of-four NFT to a winner of four specific criteria: “The Cryptographer” to whomever solves Pak’s Twitter puzzle, “The Hunter” to whomever acquired a previous Pak piece from a secondary market for the highest value, “The Influencer,” to the individual who posts #PakWasHere to the biggest audience, and “The Oracle,” to the person who most closely estimates the total sale of the auction before its start on April 12.
See also: The 20 Top-Selling NFT Artists to Collect Right Now
Finally, “The Builder” is a set of 30 NFTs to be gifted by Pak to “artists, builders, and creators who have paved the way for Pak and other NFT artists...without whom extraordinary leaps in the evolution of media and art would not have happened.”
Despite remaining anonymous, Pak has grown a loyal fan base and built close relationships with his collectors. A leading voice in the NFT community, Pak’s partnership with Sotheby’s was part of the art world’s dip into the NFT market.
For more information head to Sotheby’s Pack auction page.
Photography by: Pak
