The bankruptcy NFT of Three Arrows Capital at Sotheby’s made $11 million in sales – a decent number in an otherwise dying market.
Last year, Kyle Davies and Su Zhu – the two founders of Three Arrows Capital – filed for bankruptcy. 3AC was a cryptocurrency hedge fund founded in 2012, which was found to be failing to pay back its clients. While the two founders fled to Indonesia to find a safe haven, their clients were left $3.5 billion lighter in their pockets. A court in the British Virgin Islands had ordered in June 2022 for all their assets to be liquidated.
The auction at Sotheby’s last week was part of this recovery process – though it barely made a dent in the debt. Titled “Grails” sale, this was the continuation of a previous auction organized by Sotheby’s for Three Arrows Capital frozen assets. This time, some 40 digital artworks went up the auction block. By the end of the night, the tally stood at $11 million (including buyer’s fees) – much higher than the pre-sale $4.8 million estimate. The highlight of the auction was ‘Ringers #879 (The Goose)’, the physical copy of the NFT by Dmitri Cherniak, which alone sold for $6.9 million.
While the sale was an overall success due to already slashed estimates, experts have not failed to notice that NFTs are a dying market. For Sotheby’s itself, this was the first major NFT auction since their infamous CryptoPunks sale last year. NFTs, which became all the rage in the previous two years, have since lost both their heat as well as a major chunk of their market value.
