Super Mario-Inspired NFT Fetches Over $240K at Sotheby’s Auction

cryptonews.com:

Major auction house Sotheby’s first inscription auction has been a success, closing with nearly $451,000 raised.

Between December 6 and 13, Sotheby’s New York held an online sale of select BitcoinShrooms from the Bitcoin ordinals project by Shroomtoshi.

Per the company’s website,

“Elegantly weaving the nuanced tapestry of Bitcoin’s history, culture, and core technicalities, each unique, pixelated, and hand-crafted piece forms part of a masterful, yet playful guide to the revolutionary realm of Bitcoin.”

The auction featured three images from the unreleased pixilated collection, seemingly inspired by Super Mario. These include the S shroom (the “S” stands for Self-Sovereignty), the Sovereign Individual, and the BIP39 seed from which all “Bitcoin addresses and their corresponding private keys are ultimately derived.”

The initial estimate for each of the three pieces was $20,000-30,000.

After the auction closed:

In total, the price for the three was $450,850. This is five times more than the highest total estimated price of $90,000.

Sotheby’s describes Shroomtoshi as a technically inclined digital artist and a trailblazer in “the booming Ordinal ecosystem” with an encyclopedic knowledge of Bitcoin.

The artist commented that,

“The BitcoinShrooms collection is a pixelated recap of the first 13 years of Bitcoin, a homage to the 8-bit style of art that expresses a slight nostalgia for the 90s, a way to soil 10s of thousands of SSDs spread across the world with my art (->next level cyber-vandalism), a tool to raise awareness about Bitcoin and what I personally view as its core principles, an ironic way to vent at what I see as its annoying pop elements and aberrations. it is a thank you to those I worked with and learned from, to those