EDM musician Steve Aoki made $3.4 million from sales of non-fungible tokens (NFT) over the weekend, suggesting that the market mania around the cryptoasset class isn’t going anywhere.
The NFTs were produced in collaboration with artist Antoni Tudisco, and included music from Aoki alongside digital art. The tokens were sold via Nifty Gateway, the NFT marketplace owned by cryptocurrency exchange Gemini. Nifty Gateway has previously hosted high-profile sales by musician Grimes and digital artist Beeple.
Like last week’s NFT album release by rock band Kings of Leon, the Steve Aoki NFT release came in three different types of tokens. Bidding for a one of one auction piece had reached $151,000 as of Monday morning, with the auction set to close at 6 p.m Eastern. Notably, DJ 3LAU placed a bid of $133,333 on the auction piece Sunday afternoon; 3LAU recently made the second-most expensive individual NFT sale ever.
A time-limited open collection sale minted nearly 300 tokens for $5,000 and more than 600 tokens for $2,500. There was also a $2,000 dollar mystery NFT, where buyers received one of eight different artworks, similar to a videogame loot box.
Aoki’s sale is just the latest in a string of high-profile NFT sales by musicians across a variety of platforms. For Nifty Gateway specifically, 2021’s explosion in sales has been dramatic. Launched in March of last year, the company saw roughly $12 million in sales on its platform for 2020.
Nifty Gateway’s sales this year have blown that number out of the water. Nifty Gateway was bought by Gemini co-founders the Winklevoss twins in 2019.
On the date of publication, Vivian Medithi did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.
