Nyan Cat turns 10 in April (do you still feel old?), And to celebrate the anniversary of one of the healthiest memes on the internet, the artist behind the gif, Chris Torres, has released a recently remastered version at auction. On Friday, the piece sold 300 Ether on the cryptographic art platform Foundation, which translates to about $ 587,000, based on the value of the cryptocurrency at the time of publication.
In an interview with Virgin, Torres said he never intends to sell another original image file of Nyan Cat, which means that the owner of this gif now owns a truly unique piece.
“I think it’s great to know that you have the only existing piece,” he told reporters. “And I feel like Nyan Cat is going to be a really special inmate.”
Torres made a number of changes and modifications to the nearly ten-year-old gif, which included enlarging the gif and making minor artwork tweaks to correct the details that had beaten him over the years. For example, a certain star would appear and disappear at random in the original animation with 12 frames, so he took this opportunity to remove it completely. Torres told Verge that he thought the remastered version “turned out very well this time.”
If your eyebrows have risen to the price of several thousand dollars, you should know that the crypto art market has a moment. A number of online platforms have emerged in recent years, such as SuperRare, Zora and Nifty Gateway, where artists and clients exchange digital works worth thousands of dollars in the real world. The foundation is one of the newest faces on the scene, launched just two weeks ago, but has already recorded $ 410.00 in sales on Verge.
G / O Media may receive a commission
These cryptographic art platforms generally sell works through “non-fungible tokens” or NFTs, blockchain-based digital tokens that represent unique assets. Because NFTs are not divisible and no two are similar, their property can be verified and tracked through the blockchain. Although it should be noted that on many cryptographic art platforms, real sales, such as the new and improved Nyan Cat gif, are made with Ether, a cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is second only to Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization and volume, according Reuters.
The cryptographic community has been buzzing about NFTs for some time, but the traditional branches of the art world have recently begun to adopt blockchain technology. In this week, Christie’s famous auction house announced the first auction of a purely NFT-based collection: “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, a digital artist whose series of NFT-based digital works has been sold for $ 3.5 million in December. Christie’s, too confirmed with Bloomberg that he intends to accept Ether as payment for the main price of the work of art (collectors will still have to use old-fashioned dollars to cover any additional fees for the auction house).