On March 11, 2021, Christie's closed its online auction of Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days, an NFT-linked digital collage drawn from Mike Winkelmann's daily-image project. The lot had opened with a $100 starting bid and ended at about $69.3 million with premium, a price that placed Beeple among the most expensive living artists at auction. The sale mattered beyond its spectacle because it moved a blockchain-authenticated, purely digital work through a legacy auction house, with payment possible in Ether. It gave NFT art an institutional-market breakthrough while also prompting criticism about speculation, ownership, environmental cost, and the distinction between owning a token and owning copyright in a digital image.
The sale made NFTs unavoidable in contemporary-art market discourse.