The London-based digital artist XCOPY has just sold $24 million of NFTs in 10 minutes. The main auction sale was the artist’s MAX PAIN piece, which sold 7,394 NFT copies at $3,108 each (value of 1 Ethereum as of 24/03/2022). The sale was managed by Nifty Gateway, a Gemini company (Winklevoss brothers).
The other artworks sold by XCOPY during this sale were WASTER, DAMAGER LUXE, TRAITORS, among others.
XCOPY is a digital artist (or a cryptoartist as he brands himself) that you will find on Twitter and on Instagram, even though the artist explicitly states on his website he has no Instagram profile. The artist is anonymous, and being a resident of London is basically the most information you can get about him/her. According to Sotheby’s, XCOPY was born in 1981. He first opened a Tumblr website in 2010 to post his work.
XCOPY produces frantic saturated graphics that feel gloomy and dystopic. The streetart-like style but with a 4-bit computer touch makes the artist’s style very contemporary, and may explain the artist’s overwhelming popularity in the NFT arena. His high-frequency looping GIFs are spreading around the Web like wildfires.
XCOPY is among the original artists that launched the crypto art movement under the CryptoPunks banner. In 2017, his first NFT sold for £1 of ETH. The NFT platform SuperRare was launched and XCOPY was the second artist to mint on the platform.
In 2018, a minted NFT copy of XCOPY would sell for $150-$200 tops. 2021 saw the surge of media attention for NFTs and the value of the artist blew the roof off. In June 2021, the artist sold 66 copies for $7 million. XCOPY is a member of a Cryptoartist community that also act like businessmen-women, constantly reinvesting their gains in the purchase of fellow cryptoartists’ pieces.