Last week I purchased my first B.20 tokens and purchased some more today.
What are they?
B20 tokens represent fractionalized ownership of The Beeple 20 Collection.
If you don't know what that is, you may have heard of the now famous digital artist Beeple. Beeple is an artist who has been producing a digital artwork, everyday, for the past 15 years. His reputation as an artist has exploded since he entered the NFT world, a mere 4 months ago. His first NFT artwork recently sold for a record breaking $6.6m in the secondary market.
He is also famous for being the first artist to have Christie's auction their first digital art piece. That auction, titled Everydays: The First 5000 days closes in 2 days and has bids currently sitting at $9.75m.
Back to the B20.
B20 is a fascinating project that shows the ingenuity and potential of NFTs.
If we go back to January 2021. Beeple decided to auction 20 rare pieces of his works from 2020. It was his second NFT drop and showcased twenty one-of-one artworks, known as the The Beeple 20 Collection.
Unknown to anyone, a single collector, anonymously acquired all 20 of those pieces. Spending over $150,000 per piece and $3.5m in the process. That collector, then spent another ~$500,000 acquiring virtual land in virtual worlds like CryptoVoxels, Decentralanad and Somnium Space. In those worlds, they used the land to build a virtual museum, to showcase The Beeple 20 Collection.
From there, they took all these pieces of digital art and bundled them together into one smart contract. That smart contract, fractioanlizes The Beeple 20 Bundle into 10 million tokens, known as B20 tokens. Through the B20 token, anyone could now own a piece of The Beeple 20 Collection.
The B20 token today trades at over $21. At that price, the current market cap of the collection is $80m.
You may be thinking, this is crazy. How can someone buy some digital art and some digital land for $4m, and that now be worth $80m a few weeks later?
This is the beauty of NFTs. It unlocks new ways to create value, ownership and financial incentives into the digital assets that are created around us.
Art is no longer something that sits dead on a wall. Locked up. Illiquid. Inaccessible. It is now something more alive, liquid and able to produce value beyond its aesthetic appeal. It has turned into an art form that is a liquid asset. And the asset has become part of the art form.
If we look at the B.20 collection, there is also logic behind it.
If one single Beeple artwork sells for $6.6m, then what is 20 Beeple's artworks worth? And if the current Christies auction is already at $10m, then those 20 can only be worth even more.
It will be interesting to see where the Christie's auction closes in two days time. If the auction closes above $20m, it will make Beeple amongst the top 10% of living artist sales in the history of the world.
With the new economic models that unlock value in these NFT artworks, I wouldn't be surprised if we see the Christie's hammer fall at $20m or more.
You can follow the Christie’s auction here.
B20 and the Fractionalization of NFTs