Bjarne Melgaard Sold The Art Of Cryptography For Over 10 Million – E24

Bjarne Melgaard’s NFT sale opened to the public on Saturday, January 22 and closed again on Sunday evening.

By that time, 1,025 copies had been sold out of 1,122.

– NFTs that have not been sold have been burned, meaning deleted, says coordinator Sam Farao, who also gets his share of the income from the sale.

An NFT (non-replaceable token) is a digital file stored on the blockchain, such as an image or video. They differ from other digital photos and videos in that they are clearly original.

Pharaoh says he wasn’t surprised by the high sales, but they didn’t allow themselves to anticipate it either.

Bjarne Milgaard is an international artist, and we knew there would be a lot of interest. Pharaoh says he’s never made art this way before, so we were excited.

Sharp drop in prices

The price of each NFT was 0.5 ethereum. With today’s price of around 21,000 kroner, this means that the art project brought in Ethereum worth 10.7 million kroner.

What Bjarne Melgaard actually adds to his portfolio, of course, depends on when the cryptocurrency was sold. At the moment, Ethereum, like other leading cryptocurrencies, is in a negative direction.

– Now I’m at the beginning of this NFT project, and the idea of ​​realizing cryptocurrency I haven’t thought of yet. Milgaard wrote in an email that it is unnatural for me to think of this now.

In the days before the release, while more interested people could pre-order NFTs, each digital artwork was worth around 14,000 kroner.

If you buy on Sunday night with recently purchased Ethereum, the price will be around 10500 NOK.

And if you look back a few months ago, the price of Ethereum has almost halved since the peak since early November/December last year.

This is the case with cryptocurrencies, and the timing of this kind of thing is hard to tell. Of course, we are primarily interested in art, and how to pass it on to the people there. We’ll continue with that focus, and the price of Ethereum is really something that’s not very important in the process we’re in right now, says Pharaoh.

No two are quite alike

In September last year, E24 was able to write for the first time about NFT’s Bjarne Melgaard project.

Collaborating with curator Sam Farrow, “The Lightbulb Man,” one of Melgaard’s masterpieces, has been digitized.

They extracted prints from Milgaard’s archive, scanned them and added special features and characteristics to the works that ensured none of the 1122 variants matched exactly.

It is then stored on the ethereum blockchain. Through blockchain technology, one can guarantee that the artwork is original. Hence the name NFT. This stands for “non-replaceable token” and can be translated to “non-replaceable data device”.

However, it wasn’t revealed exactly which “Light Man” the buyer received until Monday night, several hours after the last purchases.

Earns on every resale

When E24 interviewed Melgaard and Pharaoh about the case last fall, Melgaard said he had no idea what he would gain from crypto, but he was of course financially motivated to do so.

At the time, there was a slightly different pricing model for the project. The initial price plan stipulated a larger total amount of Ethereum than in the end.

Combined with the fact that they conducted analyzes indicating a price increase of up to 90 thousand dollars per Ethereum until the new year, the partners were able to set the income in the range of 200 million kroner.

So it was “only” 10 million on the two, although this can go up quickly with higher rates from Ethereum. However, Melgaard’s income does not stop at the first sale, as is the case with traditional art.

Blockchain technology also allows the artist to benefit from any price increase.

Each time one of Melgaard’s NFTs is resold, he will receive a small percentage of the purchase price.