Christie's NFT platform: Full of virtual hope

Christie's has not yet lost faith in the NFT market, which it helped launch with its $69 million auction of a non-fungible token from Beeple in March 2021.

On the contrary: the auction house has now opened its own sales platform for NFTs under the name "Christie's 3.0", on which buyers can register their digital purses ("wallets") directly and then bid online on NFTs - based on the model of the market-leading NFT trading venue OpenSea.

Competitor Sotheby's has long had a similar in-house sales department for crypto art, the "Sotheby's Metaverse".

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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However, Christie's intends to continue offering NFTs with particularly high sales expectations in traditional evening auctions.

At Christie's it is also possible to understand how high the competitive pressure is at the personnel level in the young NFT business: It was not until the beginning of July that the specialist Nicole Sales Giles took over as head of the department for digital sales at the auction house, replacing Noah Davis, who went to Yuga Labs, the company behind the most commercially successful NFT collections, the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" and the "CryptoPunks".

The opening auction of “Christie's 3.0” will include works by the young video artist Diana Sinclair (estimate 6 to 8 ether).

After the collapse of the NFT business as a result of the cryptocurrency crash, hopes are now being pinned on a new attractiveness of the Ethereum blockchain, which has become much more energy-efficient and therefore more climate-friendly as a result of the system conversion, and on which Christie's and Sotheby's also trade.

However, according to data from the analyst Dune Analytics, the global trading volume in NFTs has fallen by 97 percent since January.

You might consider what else the auction house has on offer as a counterweight: On November 30, Christie's in Hong Kong will be putting the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex up for auction, estimated at up to $25 million - the epitome of a good old-fashioned analog tangible asset.