[imagesource: Bored Apes Yacht Club / South China Morning Post / Handout]

Bored Apes Yacht Club is a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) featuring 10 000 apes, all looking uniquely bored and uninterested.

Quite a few of them make up the handful of the most expensive NFTs sold last year.

The only way that I can make sense of that is believing it’s because they represent the dissatisfaction of being a rich animal and that buying an NFT of one is the most meta (the original meta, not Facebook Meta) things a person can do these days.

The first NFT was created in 2014 by a digital artist who goes by the name Quantum, real name Kevin McCoy.

Since then, the internet trend has taken off considerably, changing how people invest in art and how digital creations are shared on the World Wide Web.

It might have seemed like that bubble was about to burst, but alas, people are still very much jumping on the NFT bandwagon. This includes luxury brands, businessfolk, geeks, art collectors, and even the Trumps, reported Luxury Launches:

Dolce & Gabbanas took NFT to the runway. Their debut collection itself made a whopping $5.7 million. Melania Trump is raising money for foster care charities by selling watercolour paintings of her eyes as NFT.

Fashion lovers unable to get their hands on a tangible Hermes Birkin bag are happily settling for an NFT of the coveted handbag. Not just bags, the NFT craze is spreading like wildfire and someone actually paid $650,000 for an NFT of a luxury yacht.

But you’re really here to check out all the most expensive NFTs sold in 2021 so let’s get to it.

1. ‘The First 5 000 Days’ sold by Christie’s and made by Beeple received $69 million:

Image: Beeple

2. Beeple’s dystopian ‘HUMAN ONE’ 3D video sculpture was also sold by Christie’s for $28,9 million:

Image: Beeple

3. Yuga Labs’ set of 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs sold for $24,4 million at Sotheby’s auction house:

Image: Yuga Labs

4. Larva Labs’ nine small pixel-art portraits (out of 10 000 characters) called ‘CryptoPunks’ sold at Christie’s for $16,9 million:

Image: Larva Labs

5. Larva Labs’ CryptoPunk #7523 sold at Sotheby’s for $11,8 million:

Image: Larva Labs

6. The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, sold the source code of the Internet via Sotheby’s for $5,4 million:

Image: Tim Berners-Lee

7. Canadian artist Mad Dog Jones sold ‘Replicator‘ in a bidding war that lasted two weeks for $4,1 million:

Image: Mad Dog Jones

This one is interesting because, as the name suggests, the Replicator generates a new unique NFT every 28 days and comes with a total of seven unique generations of artworks.

The first generation NFT is set to produce six NFTs at the rate of one per month, with each generation unique to the rest.

8. These ‘Fungible Cubes’ made by artist Pak sold for $1,3 million:

Image: Pak

Don’t feel bad if you’re still trying to play catch-up with what exactly a non-fungible token is. Essentially it is the buying, selling, and collection of anything in a digital form, from a drawing, a tweet, memes, a picture, or video.

If you buy an NFT, you become the sole owner (provided with a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership), which means the NFT cannot be copied without losing value.

Similar to how when someone buys an original artwork from a renowned artist, only one person or entity can own the original, with any reproductions being worth very little.

Let’s see what 2022’s NFTs have in store for us, I guess.

[source:luxurylaunches]