Pak’s Nifty Gateway Drop “Largest Ever Art Sale by a Living Creator”

Yet another record has been broken in the NFT art space. This past weekend, crypto creator Pak shifted 250,000 NFTs. In total, sales amounted to $91.8million, a figure touted as the “largest-ever art sale by a living creator”. But what exactly did Pak’s Nifty Gateway drop entail?

The sale took place between 2nd and 4th December 2021 and centred on Pak’s latest project, ‘The Merge’. A quarter of a million mass tokens were created. Each was programmed to combine with others in the series. As such, the more tokens a collector amassed, the more their ‘final mass’ would be. ‘Bonus mass’, accumulating as more tokens were bought, was also offered as an incentive. Clearly, this worked, with 26,000 crypto wallets used in the sale.

Is Pak’s Nifty Gateway Drop Really the Largest Art Sale Ever?

According to Nifty Gateway, yes, this is the largest art sale ever by a living artist. However, there’s some small print here we need to consider.

Basically, this is the highest value a single work has ever brought in for a living artist. Previously, this accolade belonged to Jeff Koons. His sculpture, ‘Rabbit’, sold for $91.1million in 2019, more than any other piece made by someone who is still with us.

Nevertheless, there is some room for debate. Pak’s ‘work’ is actually divided into 250,000 editions. So, when we calculate the overall money spent in terms of how many individual pieces were involved, each was only worth $372. Even if we base the maths on how many people were involved — so $93million into 26,000 — each token brought in around $3600.

According to Artprice, this year $2.7billion has been spent on original work, with many suggesting this is largely due to the NFT boom. The likes of Andy Warhol, Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, and Damian Hirst are all now in the space. As such, it’s not hard to understand why the scene may be responsible for a bumper art sales year.