How the auction house Christie’s received NFTs after the sale of 69 million dollars of the Bible

In the year In early 2021, NFTs were often the hottest technology among tech nerds online. By early spring, they were everywhere: plastered on the front pages of major news outlets, discussed in the workplace, summoned to kitchen tables around the world, and mocked and mocked on late-night television.

One particular event looms large in that timeframe: In the year On March 11, digital artist Mike “Beeple” Winkelman sold the Ethereum NFT project “Daily: The First 5000 Days”. A record breaking 69.3 million dollars At Christie's auction. Within minutes, news publications and social media accounts began breathlessly trying to spread the word about the sale and curious new technology at the center.

The Beeple sale permanently changed not only public perception of NFTs, but also the auction house behind it. After the auction, Christie's — a 257-year-old institution until then known for its handling of masterpieces, jewelry and historical artifacts — suddenly had first-mover advantage at the cutting edge of a new technological frontier.

In the months after March 2021, the holding auction house started setting up several new wings of the company. Christie VenturesCapital arm focused on technology and Christie 3.0-A first-of-its-kind, fully on-chain Ethereum NFT art marketplace built by a titan of the traditional art world.

Since Christie's 3.0 launched a year ago, it has auctioned works on the chain, both from digital-native artists. Claire Silver, William Mapan, Jack Butcherbut also versions of works on the chain from traditional artists Keith Haring. In the process, he has saturated the emerging on-chain art market with the legitimacy of one of the world's most respected art brands.

But the path that brought Christine to her current dominant position at the intersection of art and technology was never guaranteed—and never expected. By all accounts, the historic sale that started it all was a dud.

“When we put it up for sale, we had zero expectations—the starting bid was $100 and we had no reserve,” Nicole Sale-Giles, director of digital art at Christie's, who helped lead Bippel's “First 5,000 Days” auction, told Decrypt. Scene That first bid. “And then we're sitting there looking at the computer, and we're like, ‘What kind of thing?' He just kept going.”

Soon after this article grabbed international headlines for its record sale price, Sales Giles and her colleagues realized they had found something bigger than an eye-catching auction.

John Ross, head of digital design at Christie's, recalls Le Haye's first exposure to NFT art: “It was the first beep that I ever really paid attention to.” “That's the biggest thing that Nicole brought to Christy. I think I – and I think the whole art market – did a double take at that kind of price. That's when I saw his potential.”

Confidence in that potential was bolstered by the fact that immediately after the Beeple sale, Christie's high-powered clients peppered the auction house's staff daily with questions about how best to use NFTs as a new asset class. .

“We always say: We go where our collectors want us to go,” said Le Hai. “If more collectors are asking, there's a market there. This really empowered us—and we knew we needed a platform to be empowered.

So Le Haye, Sales Giles and a few other enthusiastic Christie's employees soon quit their day jobs and embarked on a ragtag project to create a fully blockchain-native digital auction platform worthy of the Christie's brand.

“For me, it was terrifying — absolutely terrifying, blockchain,” Le Haye said. “They know nothing about art on the part of the builders. We just trust. And it just worked. I don't know how.”

One of the main obstacles facing the project is Christie's team's insistence that the platform's auction mechanism is on-chain, which is Christie's 3.0's true and long-term commitment to blockchain-powered artwork.

“It would have been very easy to build the whole thing on Web 2.0 and do what everyone else is doing: in a format that looks like a crowdsourced auction, but it's not,” says Daniel Hart. Chris product designer. “You know, once the auction closes, and then You shop on a chain – we can easily come to that.

But the team pushed forward with its vision of a fully chained digital art platform. And after about half a year of construction and testing, by the end of 2022, it was ready.

Christie 3.0 launches in October 2022. Over the years and since its inception, the platform has experimented with a variety of featured artists, artistic mediums, and auction structures—serving as an informal incubator for Christie's as a whole.

One such experiment, in May, saw the Christie's 3.0 team list a very small collection. NFT pieces inspired by Twitter By digital artist Jack Butcher without adding speculations to his works. It sounds simple, but it would have made waves at a traditional and regimented auction house like Christie's. The pieces were instead listed at an unusually low opening bid of $8—a testament to the controversial Twitter at the center of Butcher's project.

“I remember there was an explosion on our site. We had over 500 new registrants for the auction. Everyone was trying to bid, and we couldn't believe what we were seeing,” recalls Lydia Chen, a member of Christie's 3.0 digital art sales team, of the Butcher auction. “We've never seen such a rush to bid before.”

NFTs didn't just fuel Christine's appetite for risk in the art world. They have expanded the conservative auction house's willingness to take on entirely new sectors.

In the months after Beeple's March 2021 sale—before Christie's 3.0 got off the ground—Christie tapped Microsoft veteran Devang Thakkar to see if he could help sift through the surprising tech-related information that was suddenly pouring into the storied company.

The next day [the Beeple sale]Now they're starting to get information and the deal flow is comparable to the most successful capitalist enterprise, Thakkar said. “Anyone in the digital art and web3 fields suddenly asked, ‘What were you thinking doing this Beeple sale?' They wanted to ask us. or ‘I have a company, you're very forward-thinking and want to collaborate?'

So Thakkar helped turn that deal into a venture capital firm's flow due to a venture capital firm. In the year In July 2022, Christie Ventures opened its doors, providing a tech-minded VC with a unique entry point into one of the world's leading art institutions. Since then, the company has invested in seven projects, ranging from blockchain technology and AI to FinTech, SaaS and hardware.

“Christie's was established probably 100 years before the first light bulb. There was no technology when we were founded,” Thakkar said. “I bet one of our customers was the first to come up with the two bitcoins or any new technology that I've left these days.”

“Our customers are very wealthy,” Thakkar continued. “They're looking for good things in life, including art, and they're buying new technologies and experimenting with them. I think we can benefit from learning about these technologies as our customers use them and integrating them again, thoughtfully, into the smart market.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.