Christie’s auction house has announced the sale of a digital portrait of the Bitcoin code for more than $130,000.
It marks the first time an NFT was auctioned at a major auction house, and the price exceeded expectations.
According to the auction house, an unknown buyer purchased “Block 21,” a physical piece of art and non-fungible token (NFT) of Satoshi for $131,250 at Christie’s on Oct. 7. The artwork, fabricated by Ben Gentilli with the Robert Alice project, is one of 40 creations in a series, and holds exactly 322,048 digits of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin (BTC) code.
The series, titled Portraits of a Mind, shows the cryptocurrency’s 12.3 million digits of original code individually engraved and painted on 40 different circular panels. Block 21, referencing the scarcity of Bitcoin being capped at 21 million coins, features as one of these panels.
“The work is a symbolic expression of Satoshi’s vision, forged out of the very code that lies at the genesis of it all,” states the Robert Alice website.
