Non-Fungible Token Artists

Earnings for NFT artists range from $0 to tens of millions of dollars for a single work or groups of works. For example, the artist Pak sold, The Merge, for $91.8 million—the top price received for a NFT as of the publication date of this article. But debate continues on whether this is a single piece or a series of artworks because a reported 28,983 collectors purchased 312,686 total NFTs to create the artwork, according to Barron's. The artist Beeple sold Everydays—The First 5,000 Days, a series of digital artworks, for $69.3 million—the second-highest price for a NFT as of the publication date of this article. A video clip of Lebron James dunking a basketball sold for $208,000, and an early YouTube hit, Charlie Bit Me (which features a toddler biting his brother’s finger) fetched $761,000 as an NFT. The University of California at Berkeley auctioned off an NFT that contained documents from a Nobel-prizewinner cancer researcher for $50,000. On the other hand, many NFTs do not receive any offers from buyers or sell for only a few hundred dollars.

The NFT world is a lot like the traditional art world in that the artist needs talent, strong promotional abilities, and a little luck to get noticed and sell their work. One major difference in the NFT world is that the artist does not have to work with a middleman (galleries or agents) but can sell his or her creation directly to customers via one of the online marketplace (although artists still must pay a commission and other fees to the marketplace). This allows them to earn a significantly higher profit from the sale and even—if written into a smart contract—receive royalties from the sales of their work if the customer re-sells it. In a smart contract, computer code is stored on a blockchain that allows certain actions to be executed without human approval under specified circumstances.

As self-employed artists and/or creators, NFT artists do not receive fringe benefits such as health insurance or paid vacation days.