EASEL-Y FOOLED: Thousands Of NFTs Bought By Art Lovers Now Virtually Worthless- REFILED TO ADD MORE DETAILS

Story By:  Ana MarjanovicSub-EditorMichael Leidig, Agency:  Newsflash

A cache of thousands of NFTs of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt sold to art lovers are now worth a fraction of their purchase price after prices crashed by 87 per cent.

The sale of the non-fungible tokens brought the Belvedere Museum in Vienna millions of Euros in profit.

But just months later the digital images are now worth a fraction of their sale price following a worldwide crash in cryptocurrencies.

Preview NFT “The Kiss”. (arteQ/Newsflash)

The NFTs sold by the Beldevere enticed an enormous number of people to invest when they split the Kiss into sections, creating 10,000 unique NFTs that were put up for sale for EUR 1,850 each.

In the end, they sold 2,415 of them fetching EUR 4.4 million.

But now the value of those sold NFTs have been hit by the global depression of all digital assets and the Klimt NFTs are now on sale on the marketplace Opensea for 0.11 ETH, which is the cryptocurrency ETH, meaning they are worth just EUR 220, a fraction of the sale price.

Preview NFT “The Kiss”. (arteQ/Newsflash)

The market for artworks as NFTs reached its peak in 2021 with the artist Pak selling his work The Merge on Nifty Gateway for USD 91.8 million, with 28,983 collectors snapping up 312,686 total units as a nonfungible token (NFT).

But the market is still continuing to trade, for example, a sale going on until the 26th of this month by the Leopold museum which is also based in Vienna is offering its own artworks as NFTs.

In total, 24 digital versions of works by Egon Schiele are being sold at prices even higher than those of the Belvedere. Depending on the classification, prices range from EUR 499 to EUR 100,000.