Artist Pak Just Sold 266,445 Shares of an NFT for $91.8 Million on Nifty Gateway—Making Him (Arguably?) Pricier Than Jeff Koons

Nearly 30,000 buyers bought portions of the work, which could, in theory, be merged into a single NFT.

Pak's Mass Banner. Courtesy Nifty Gateway.

An NFT sale hosted by Nifty Gateway just made Pak the most expensive living artist, knocking Jeff Koons off the top spot—or so says Nifty Gateway.

In the curiously designed sale, which brought in $91.8 million, 28,000 buyers bought 266,445 units of a Pak artwork that could, in theory, be combined into a single NFT owned by a single buyer worth the eye-popping, multimillion-dollar total.

The intricacies get more complicated as the sale—or “merge,” as Nifty Gateway and Pak called it—is broken down.

The event began on December 2, when buyers were invited to buy stakes of the work that could later be accumulated into a greater “mass.” Prices started at $299 for buyers who already owned works by Pak. Later, after the sale was opened to anyone, the price jumped to $575 per share and increased by $25 an hour through the end of the auction.

Nifty Gateway offered price breaks for anyone buying in bulk: buy 10, get one free; buy 1,000, get 300 free. Sales were tracked on a leaderboard showing who had acquired the most “mass” until the sale ended on December 4.

The resulting NFTs were minted over the following days, each worth the total number of shares purchased by any single buyer. The NFT that ends up with the largest “mass” is the alpha, which could conceivably grow if its owner buys more shares from another collector on the secondary market.

Adding yet another twist, if any portion is resold to a buyer with other portions, the corresponding NFTs that are traded are then destroyed and “amassed” into the new, larger work, which conceivably grows in value.

If all 266,445 units are combined into one work, it would make the new, single NFT pricier than Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), which sold at Christie’s New York in 2019 for $91 million.

In October, Nifty Gateway made headlines for another reason when an irate bidder sued the platform after he was asked to pay $650,000 for a Beeple work on what he thought was a losing bid.


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