At first, Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran weren’t sure they had just spent $69.3 million on a digital artwork by an artist called Beeple, securing their place in art history. The March 11 auction at Christie’s in London immediately catapulted Beeple’s artwork into the realm of the most expensive pieces ever sold by living artists, alongside a well-known swimming pool painting by David Hockney and an iconic stainless steel rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons. And it has also kicked off a new explosion of interest in non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a sort of cryptocurrency-adjacent technology that provides the digital equivalent of a certificate of authenticity.
