A digital artwork sold for nearly $70 million US at Christie’s on Thursday, in the first sale by a major auction house of a piece of art that does not exist in physical form.
Everydays – The First 5000 Days is a digital work by American artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple. It is a collage of 5,000 individual images, which were made one-per-day over more than thirteen years.
The sale of the work for $69,346,250 put Beeple in the top three most valuable living artists, Christie’s said in a tweet.
Beeple responded to the sale result with an expletive on Twitter.
The work is in the form of a new type of digital asset — a non-fungible token (NFT) — meaning it is authenticated by a digital ledger known as blockchain, which certifies its originality and ownership.
The tokens, which have swept the online collecting world recently, are used to prove that the item is one of a kind, allowing buyers to claim ownership.
NFTs are aimed at solving a problem central to digital collectibles: how to claim ownership of something that can be easily and endlessly duplicated.
Fallen Trump fetched $6.6M
The market for NFTs has soared in recent months as enthusiasts and investors use spare savings to buy up items that exist online. Last month, a 10-second video clip featuring an image of a fallen Donald Trump, also by Beeple, sold for $6.6 million on an NFT marketplace called Nifty Gateway.
“Without the NFTs, there just legitimately was no way to collect digital art,” said Beeple, who makes irreverent digital art on themes such as technology, wealth and American politics.
Christie’s said Beeple’s collage fetched the highest price in an online-only auction and the highest price for any winning bid placed online.
Some 22 million people tuned in on the Christie’s website for the final moments of bidding, with bidders from 11 countries taking part.
Front Burner22:50The multimillion dollar NFT crypto market explained
Between Grimes, Kings of Leon and even NBA Top Shot, all of a sudden it seems like NFTs are everywhere. But what are non-fungible tokens, really? And why are they blowing up right now? CBC Business reporter Pete Evans explains. Find the links we talk about in this episode here: cbc.ca/1.5943429 22:50
Asked what he thought of the multi-million dollar bids on his work, the 39-year-old graphic designer, who has created concert visuals for the likes of Justin Bieber, One Direction and Katy Perry, said he was lost for words.
“I don’t know. … Maybe you can put an emoji into the story,” he said. “It’s so crazy.”
For NFTs, the artist’s royalties are locked in to the contract: Beeple receives 10 per cent each time the NFT changes hands after the initial sale.
“I do really think that this is going to be seen as the next chapter of art history,” Beeple said.
NFT frenzy
Various digital objects can be minted as NFTs and traded as assets, including art, sports collectibles, patches of land in virtual worlds, cryptocurrency wallet names and even tweets. Twitter Inc boss Jack Dorsey is conducting a digital auction of his first ever tweet, in NFT form.
Art NFTs make up around a quarter of the all-time NFT sales volume ($415 million) according to NonFungibles.com, which aggregates sales history data for the Ethereum blockchain, the most commonly used ledger for recording these types of assets.
A detail shot from the collage. Beeple believes non-fungible tokens could represent the future of ownership. (Beeple/Christie’s Images/Reuters)
Musicians are also getting in on the hype, with American rock band Kings of Leon having launched an album as an NFT.
Beeple says the explosion in NFTs is due in part to the increased amount of time people are spending online during the pandemic. Like many enthusiasts, he also believes they could represent the future of ownership.
“Equities have been the predominant asset class for the last hundred years, or whatever. I don’t think it’s guaranteed that that’s always going to stay like that. I think kids today hate corporations,” he said. “So the idea that they’re just going to automatically blindly give them their money to invest, I don’t know about that.”
Risk of losses when hype dies down
But, like many new niche investment areas, there is a risk of losses if the hype dies down. Many NFTs will eventually become worthless, Beeple said.
Although NFTs can function as a legally enforceable contract, they also raise issues relating to insurance, tax and intellectual property, said Max Dilendorf, a cryptocurrency lawyer and partner at Dilendorf Law Firm in New York.
“If you are a buyer of an expensive piece of NFT, you have to know what features and terms you are subject to,” he said.
“From my experience, participants in NFT markets are not really thinking it through carefully.”
Dilendorf said that he expects the entire physical art market to be digitized in NFT form in the next five years.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
