Over the last few years, all kinds of new and varied methods of investment and stock options have opened up, culminating in everything from the Gamestop fiasco to other people making enormous amounts of money in very little time. One of these people was Pablo Rodriguez-Frail.
Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent around $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online in October 2020. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million.
According to CNBC, the video was by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann. The computer-generated video shows a giant Donald Trump collapsed on the ground, his body covered in slogans
The video was authenticated by blockchain, which works as a digital signature to certify who owns it and to guarantee it is the original work.
Blockchain technology allows items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind. This is in stark contrast to traditional online objects which can be reproduced endlessly.
These items are a new type of digital asset known as a non-fungible tokens (NFT), and investors are spending massive amounts of money buying things that only exist online.
Rodriguez-Fraile, who bought Beeple’s piece because of his knowledge of the artist’s work, said,
You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work. The reality here is that this is very, very valuable because of who is behind it.
Check out the video below.
Is this the future of art? We can only wait and watch.