At a live Christie's auction in New York on Tuesday evening, an online bidder from Switzerland bid US$28.9 million for HUMAN ONE, a three-dimensional video sculpture by an artist known as Beeple.

"Human One" is a three-dimensional moving sculpture that shows a spacesuit-clad person moving through a variety of climatic conditions. The sculpture of a white mahogany pillar with LED screens portrays a life-sized astronaut in a silvery suit and mirrored helmet. The column slowly rotates, giving the impression that the figure is strolling through sci-fi land.

Christie's predicted it would sell for $15 million, but the piece sold for $25 million. The winning bid was made by a former venture partner at Olaf Carlson-Wee's Polychain Capital, Ryan Zurrer.

It is becoming increasingly common to use the real-life materials of the art establishment instead of pixels. This is the latest indication of a historic merger between traditional and digital art. According to dealers, such experiments could help digital artists expand their collector base and raise the prices of their works.

Besides conventional collectors, NFTs are also gaining in popularity among and established artists, particularly hybrid versions of so-called digital and physical artworks.

During last year's cryptocurrency boom, digital artists realized they could tokenize their JPEGs with the same technology used to track cryptocurrency, making them as distinctive as any artist's work. Prices and ownership details are logged on a digital ledger known as a blockchain.

They were first introduced on the Ethereum blockchain by CryptoKitties, a collectible that allowed people to use ETH to breed unique animated cats.

Market data tracker Nonfungible.com estimates that NFT artworks have sold for $1.8 billion in the past year. In the third quarter, the trading volume of the digital tokens exceeded $10 billion, an increase of 38,000%.

Pavan A

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA