Grimes is the latest artist to get in on the NFT gold rush, selling around $6 million worth of digital artworks after putting them up for auction yesterday.
A series of 10 pieces — some one of a kind, others with thousands of copies — went up for sale on Nifty Gateway on February 28th. The highest-selling piece was a one-of-a-kind video called “Death of the Old” that involves flying cherubs, a cross, a sword, and glowing light that’s set to an original song by Grimes. The winning bidder took it for nearly $389,000.
The bulk of the sales came from two pieces with thousands of copies available that sold for $7,500 each. The works, titled “Earth” and “Mars,” are both short videos featuring their titular planet with a giant cherub over it holding a weapon, also set to original music. Nearly 700 copies were sold for a total of $5.18 million before sales closed.
Grimes isn’t the only artist to have made out big on NFTs already. The digital artist Beeple sold $3.5 million worth of art through Nifty Gateway last year. The artist behind Nyan Cat made around $600,000. And the electronic musician 3LAU reportedly made more than $11 million from album sales and digital goods just this weekend.
Nifty Gateway said that an undisclosed percentage of Grimes’ sales would go to Carbon180, a nonprofit focused on removing carbon from the atmosphere. The donations may be meant to address one of the major problems that NFTs share with other blockchain technologies — they’re hugely inefficient in their electricity use.