NFTS CAN COST ARTISTS MORE MONEY THAN THEY MAKE

Another benefit proponents of NFTs assert is that they can help artists make money by selling NFTs of their own artwork, but demand for that NFT artwork may be illusory. For example, the jaw-dropping $69 million NFT sale from artist Beeple grabbed headlines in March 2021. However, a few months before this sale, a project called Metapurse had purchased 20 other unrelated Beeple artworks, bundled them together, and in January 2021 sold 10 million fractionalized ownership tokens of the collection, called B20 tokens. Ostensibly, the idea was to let people who couldn’t afford to buy expensive artworks buy portions of the collection and join the speculation game. The buyer for the $69 million Beeple in March—angel investor Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan—also owned 59 percent of the B20 tokens. B20 tokens were initially sold to the public on January 23 at 36 cents per token before hitting a high of $23.62—a 6,461 percent increase—just a couple of days before the two-week-long $69 million Beeple auction reached its end. By the end of May, B20 was back down to trading for under a dollar. As of this writing, the token is trading for 40 cents. Beeple himself also owned 2 percent of the B20 tokens. This means both the seller and buyer of the most noteworthy NFT sale at the time had the same vested interest in driving up demand for the artist’s work, with the buyer standing to make more from the arrangement than the seller—the artist himself.