Sotheby's Metaverse arm sells over $2.5M as part of 3AC auctions
And more exciting pieces going on auction very soon...
Three Arrows Capital (3AC) was a hedge fund founded by Kyle Davies and Su Zhu that collapsed and filed for bankruptcy in June 2022 (after borrowing billions of dollars to fund its operations). The firm invested in an extensive list of protocols and blockchains (e.g., Solana, Luna, Ethereum, Polkadot, and Aave).
According to the latest reports, they face $3.5B(!) in creditor claims.
Interestingly, Davies and Zhu had a strong taste in art (hopefully?), as among their assets is an impressive digital art collection.
Teneo, the company in charge of liquidating the collection to pay back part of the debt, released the list of artworks. It includes iconic digital art pieces: Archetype by Kjetil Golid (13), Apparitions by Aaron Penne (20), Autoglyphs (3), CENTURY by Casey REAS (4), Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro (2), CryptoPunks (11), Deafbeef (3), Crypto Citizen (1), Elementals by Michael Connolly (3), Elevated Deconstructions by luxpris (4), Endless Nameless by Rafaël Rozendaal (5), Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs (30), Genesis by DCA (2), Ringers by Dmitri Cherniak (17), Subscapes by Matt DesLauriers (7), Alpha Centauri Kid 1/1s (3).1
Sotheby's Metaverse got its hands into these outstanding collections and is auctioning them at different dates in public and private auctions —they call these pieces GRAILS (not to be confused with PROOF Grails).
The first artworks went on auction last week, and all have been going for more than anticipated by Sotheby’s analyst. As I noted in the weekly digest, Fidenza #725 by Tyler Hobbs sold for over $1M, while Autoglyph #187 by Larva Labs went for over half a million dollars.
Besides the pieces that already sold (beating the estimates by a wide margin), I made a list of the ones I would bid on — if I had the means — and included my own sales estimate…
It will be fun to see how far off I was (or accurate)…
Ringers #879 by Dmitri Cherniak, aka “The Goose”
Estimation: $340,000 to $400,000.
