Nyan Cat will turn 10 years old in April (feeling old yet?), And to celebrate the birthday of one of the healthiest memes on the web, the artist behind the poison, Chris Torres, has posted a new remastered version offered for auctionOn Friday, the piece sold for 300 Ether on the crypto art platform Foundation, which translates to approximately $ 587,000 based on the value of the cryptocurrency at the time of publication.
In an interview with the edge, Torres said he never plans to sell another original image file of Nyan Cat, meaning the patron of this poison now owns a truly unique piece.
“I think it’s cool to know you own the only piece in existence,” he said to the outlet. “And I feel like Nyan Cat will be a really special one to own.”
Torres made a series of tweaks and changes to the nearly decade-old poison, including increasing the size of the poison and making minor tweaks to the art to correct details that irritated him over the years. For example, a particular star would randomly appear and disappear in the original 12-frame animation, so he took this opportunity to remove it completely. Torres told The Verge that he thought the remastered version “turned out really well this time.”
If your eyebrows shoot up at that multi-thousand dollar price tag, you should know that the crypto art market is having a great moment. In recent years, a number of online platforms have emerged, such as SuperRare, Zora and Nifty Gateway, where artists and clients exchange digital works worth thousands of real dollars. Foundation is one of the newest faces on the scene, which launched just two weeks ago, but it has reportedly already registered $ 410.00 in sales, per The Verge.
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These crypto art platforms generally sell works through ‘non-replaceable tokens’ or NFTs, blockchain-based digital tokens representing unique assets. Since NFTs are not shareable and no two are alike, their ownership can be verified and tracked through blockchain. Although it should be noted that on many crypto art platforms the actual sales, such as that of the new and improved Nyan Cat gif, are made with Ether, a cryptocurrency that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is second to Bitcoin in terms of market cap and volume, according to Reuters
The crypto community has been buzzing about NFTs for a while, but traditional branches of the art world have only recently begun to embrace blockchain technology. This week, Christie’s famous auction house announced its very first auction of a purely NFT-based collection: “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, a digital artist whose NFT-based series sold digital works for $ 3.5 million in DecemberChristie too confirmed with Bloomberg that it plans to accept Ether as payment for the artwork’s top prize (collectors will still have to use old-fashioned dollars to cover any additional costs to the auction house).