Art+Tech: The Wreckage Was Never Where the Word Puts It

The collapse was real. The mechanism was not what collapsed. A record of who paid for the correction, what the institutions were doing while the market looked away, and the argument for the technology that Christie's made first — from its own stage, in 2018. Sixth article in a sequence on the third category.

Editor's note. This is the sixth document in a sequence published across our properties this summer. THE PHYGITAL TIMES H1 2026 ART+TECH REPORT (July 15) established the data. Art+Tech: The Third Category (LV Agency, Inc., July 29) made the full argument. Physical, Digital, or Phygital (Edition 109 of The Future of Collectibles, July 30) put the choice in front of collectors. Art+Tech: The Ledger and the Wave (The Phygital Times, August 6) delivered the four patterns beneath the season's numbers. What a Collection Carries (SurR.Ai, August 12) took the argument to family offices and estate counsel. This one is for the people who were in the room when it broke — the artists, collectors and builders who were inside the NFT market when it collapsed, and who have been told ever since that the whole thing was a mistake.

"The value lies in what is being safeguarded by NFT" 

At the Christie's Art+Tech Summit on July 16, 2026, introducing a panel called "Navigating the Market," Marcus Fox, Christie's Global Managing Director of 20th and 21st Century Art, told the room that the market is post-NFT, and that he did not really want to sift through the wreckage. Introducing the advisor Benjamin "Redbeard" Gross and the digital artist Kiya Tadele, he added that although they use the technology, this conversation was not about NFTs.

Everyone in this field has heard some version of that sentence. What follows is the record underneath it — the collapse stated at full size, who actually paid for it, what the institutions were doing while the market looked away, and the argument for the technology that Christie's made first, from its own stage, in 2018.

What was said from the stage

Read the sequence of those two remarks again, because the order matters. The medium was declared finished, and then the only session in which it would appear all day was fenced off from it in advance. The one panel where digital art surfaced was not billed as a digital art panel at all. It was billed as market navigation, and the technology underneath the artist's own practice was named as something the conversation was not about.

The collapse was real and it was severe. Trading volume in art NFTs fell from roughly $2.97 billion in 2021 to $197 million in 2024, a decline of more than ninety percent. Platforms closed — Async Art, KnownOrigin, LG Art Lab. Sotheby's cut most of its own digital team. Nobody who was in that market disputes the size of what happened.

But a collapse in trading volume is a fact about prices. It is not a fact about the mechanism those prices were attached to.

An NFT is not an asset class. It is blockchain-secured provenance — a verifiable account of who made a work and who has owned it since, with resale terms written into a smart contract that executes on its own. What corrected in 2022 was the speculative pricing of things wrapped in that mechanism, and the correction was brutal.

One does not fault a safe for the fluctuating value of what it secures. The wreckage was in the market. The mechanism went on working.

Which raises the question of who the wreckage actually belonged to — because the misallocation of that answer is why the word became unusable.

Three populations, one bill

Three populations were in that market, and they wanted three different things.

Artists made work in a new medium and used the record-keeping the medium offered: authorship fixed at the moment of making, provenance carried by the piece, resale terms set by the maker rather than negotiated away afterward.

Traders bought and sold the tokens attached to that work at a velocity that had nothing to do with looking at anything. Positions were flipped in hours. The object was incidental; the trade was the point.

Institutions supplied the legitimacy that made the second group's activity possible at scale. Not passively, and not at the margins. The sale that defined the peak did not happen on a marketplace.

What the record sale actually was

On March 11, 2021, Christie's concluded a single-lot online sale of Beeple's Everydays: The First 5,000 Days at $69,346,250. It was the first purely digital NFT-based artwork offered by a major auction house, a world record for any work of digital art, and the highest total for any online-only auction the house had held. Bidding opened at $100 with no estimate assigned and ran ten days across thirty-three bidders; the final two hours took it from roughly $14 million to its close. It was also the first time a major house offered a digital-only work with an NFT as its guarantee of authenticity, and the first time cryptocurrency was accepted in payment at auction.

And it was a primary-market sale. The work had never been owned by anyone. It was minted in February 2021 through the platform MakersPlace, consigned directly by the artist, and sold with Beeple receiving the overwhelming majority of the proceeds — the house taking a fee reported at the time as likely more than ten percent.

That detail is usually skipped, and it is the important one. Christie's had, at that point, spent more than 250 years as a secondary-market institution, selling works that already had owners. Here it acted as a primary dealer for a living artist, in a medium it had never handled, on infrastructure it did not control. A house whose entire function is establishing what a thing is, who made it and who has owned it, sold a file — and could only do so because the file carried that record inside itself.

Beeple said as much in the statement Christie's released with the result: artists had been making work with hardware and software and distributing it on the internet for more than twenty years, but there had never been a real way to truly own and collect it.

That is the 2018 keynote, executed. Anne Bracegirdle, then an Associate Vice President and specialist in Christie's Photographs department, argued from the stage at the 2018 Art+Tech Summit in London that the chain could carry authorship, ownership and price where the existing apparatus could not. Less than three years later the house proved it at the largest scale available to it, in the one configuration — a primary sale of a purely digital work — that could not have happened any other way.

The house built the case, proved it, and took the fee.

Who paid

When the speculative layer collapsed, the cost was assigned almost entirely to the first group and to the technology, and almost not at all to the second or the third.

Artists working in the medium found their field described as a bubble. The term itself became unusable in institutional company. The traders moved on to another asset class and suffered nothing at all. And the institution that had originated the defining transaction, and been paid for it, closed the department four years later and described what remained as wreckage.

This is not only our reading. Writing in the first print edition of Right Click Save's ART & TECH quarterly, the magazine's founding editor Alex Estorick describes the bear market in almost exactly these terms: the actors who had previously driven the speculation disappeared, and what remained were the individuals and platforms largely committed to supporting the community of artists, collectors and, increasingly, curators.

The people who left are not the people who were blamed.

Nobody would defend that allocation if it were stated out loud. It is simply what happened. And it is how a department can close inside four years while the artists it served are still working, still selling, and still being acquired by museums.

"Just as one would not fault a safe for the fluctuating value of the assets it protects, it is misguided to blame NFT technology for the challenges associated with asset valuation or marketing strategies. The value lies in what is being safeguarded by NFT."

Read more: The Misunderstood Potential of NFTs: A Counter Narrative.

The one place the mechanism did fail

Royalties are the honest exception, and worth being precise about.

The chain never enforced them. A token standard records that ownership moved; it does not compel a marketplace to pay the artist when it does. Royalties were honored by convention — platforms chose to collect and forward them.

Then a competitor launched charging no fees and treating royalties as optional. Volume followed. Within a year the major marketplaces had followed.

Estorick names the loss precisely: the minimum ten-percent resale royalty, one of the principal benefits smart contracts were supposed to deliver, is no longer enforced by many NFT marketplaces. That benefit had been a holy grail of contemporary art for decades, going back to the Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of 1971. It arrived, briefly, and was competed away.

Nothing broke. A convention was competed away at the channel layer, and artists lost the cut. Which is the same shape as everything else in this story: the protocol did what it was built to do, and the distribution layer decided not to honor it.

What this house already argued

None of this is new ground for Christie's. It is ground the house broke, and it is worth setting out, because the record is remarkable and largely forgotten.

The inaugural Art+Tech Summit was held at Christie's St James's headquarters in London on July 17, 2018, under the title Exploring Blockchain — Is the Art World Ready For Consensus? It was co-organized with Christie's Education and Vastari. Christie's described it as an annual one-day conference intended to spark innovation and collaboration across the industry, taking one key technology trend each year and examining it through talks, panels and debates.

Note the components. A question in the title. Education as co-organizer. Debate as the format.

2018 was also the year Christie's sold the first artificial-intelligence portrait ever offered at auction. It fetched $432,500 with fees. The house that inaugurated this summit inaugurated the A.I. art market in the same twelve months.

The program carried more than thirty speakers, drawn from ConsenSys, Deloitte, Clifford Chance, Artsy, the Financial Times, Blockchain.com, Paddle8 and the Serpentine Galleries, including Hans Ulrich Obrist. Then-chief executive Guillaume Cerutti spoke. Contemporary reporting notes that while many speakers argued blockchain would benefit the art market, an equal number argued the opposite and warned about the risks of cryptocurrency. Jason Bailey of Artnome moderated the panels on digital art and provenance.

An artist supplied the centerpiece: Kevin Abosch's YELLOW LAMBO, a ten-foot neon sculpture spelling out the contract address of a token he had created.

And the technology was framed as a solution to a structural problem rather than a revenue opportunity.

The summit was spearheaded by Anne Bracegirdle, then an Associate Vice President and specialist in Christie's Photographs department. Her keynote, "The Blockchain Landscape in the Art World," proposed an industry-wide registry of every traded work of art — cataloging details, certificates of authenticity, provenance records and sale prices — on the grounds that no single record of fine art purchase prices exists, with buy-ins, after-sales and online results routinely withheld from the databases the market relies on. Blockchain's permanent, immutable record-keeping, she argued, could change that.

Read that again. In 2018, from a Christie's stage, a Christie's specialist made the case for the technology as provenance infrastructure — as a fix for the opacity that has always been the art market's structural weakness.

That is the argument. It was Christie's argument first.

What followed was a build, not an experiment. The Beeple sale in 2021. Christie's 3.0, a fully on-chain platform for collecting digital art, launched in 2022. A dedicated department. Augmented Intelligence in 2025 — the first auction at a major house dedicated entirely to art made with artificial intelligence. Seven years of institutional construction, in public, ahead of everyone else.

That last sale is worth a number. It closed at $728,784 against a $600,000 estimate, with 28 of 34 lots sold. Half the bidders were Gen Z or Millennials, and 37 percent were new to Christie's — the collectors the house says it wants, arriving through the medium it would close the department for five months later.

The following year, in 2019, the summit took on A.I. — The A.I. Revolution, held at Christie's Rockefeller Plaza in New York on June 25, produced with Christie's Education and presented by Hyundai Motor. Bracegirdle has since left the company.

In 2018 the summit was co-organized by Christie's Education. In 2026 it is organized through Christie's Ventures, the corporate investment arm.

Education to investment. The drift is not concealed. It is in the house's own announcements.

Reporting on the 2026 edition for Observer, Elisa Carollo listed the voices Christie's might readily have programmed and did not: the artist Trevor Paglen, Toledo Museum of Art director Adam Levine, and Eli Scheinman, curator of Art Basel's Zero 10.

One further detail is worth noting. The July 15 release closes with a Looking Forward section listing what Christie's wants the market watching next: an exhibition opening in London on July 16 with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Gooding Christie's at Pebble Beach, the Johnny Marr guitar collection, a Watteau and Fragonard collection in Paris, a Chinese art tribute in Hong Kong.

The Art+Tech Summit, held at the company's own headquarters the following day, is not among them.

The object that settles it

The argument above is abstract until it is a thing you can stand in front of. On that one panel, it was.

Reporting for ARTnews, Shanti Escalante-De Mattei found that beyond that single session with Gross and Tadele there was almost no representation from the artists, curators and experts who work in digital art — instead, tech founders who did not seem to know much about cultural industries, or art world participants who did not seem to know much about tech. Her assessment and our thirty-minute count were arrived at independently.

Kiya Tadele leads Yatreda, the Ethiopian collective that reinterprets historical figures and cultural memory through handmade sets and costumes, and preserves the resulting films permanently on the blockchain. Her recent work Twenty-First Century Akodama pairs a handcrafted silver crown, made with Asprey Studio, with a blockchain-minted first-person film. It was shown at Zero 10 in Miami Beach in December 2025.

An earlier work, Abyssinian Queen, was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art — the first artwork purchased fully on-chain by a United States institution.

The chain is not packaging here. Remove it and Twenty-First Century Akodama is a silver crown and a film — and the film is a file: infinitely reproducible, with nothing internal to it that distinguishes an original from a copy.

That is the oldest problem in time-based art, and the market solved it long ago by building an apparatus around the work. An edition number. A certificate of authenticity. A signed contract specifying what the buyer may install and how. A gallery's records. Video art has been collectible for fifty years because that apparatus exists — not because a moving image is inherently a collectible object. The paperwork is what makes it one, and the paperwork lives in private files, dependent on institutions that may or may not outlast the work.

The chain performs that function natively. Authorship and ownership are fixed at the moment of making, publicly, and they survive the failure of any single custodian. Tadele puts it in her own terms: what a collector or a museum acquires is every step of the process rather than the final recording, and being decentralized is what makes the work resilient to being lost over time.

So the medium here is not the film. It is the film and the record of it, made as one thing. That is the difference between a video and a collectible work, and it is not a difference of degree.

We use two terms for this, and we set them out plainly because the field has no agreed ones.

Total Art is the synthesis of image, sound, movement and duration into a single form. It runs from Ancient Greek theater through opera and ballet to film and video art and everything descended from them — and it holds within it every tradition it draws on: painting, sculpture, music, poetry, architecture, the crafted object. Total means total. What time-based work adds is duration: it cannot be taken in at a glance. It is among the oldest traditions we have, and it requires no defending from us.

Total Art + Tech is that work made collectible at the moment of its making — the chain not appended afterward as a certificate, but present in the construction of the work. The mint is the brushstroke.

That distinction is the commercial case, and it belongs to an auction house before it belongs to anyone else. A house of this kind exists to establish what a thing is, who made it, who has owned it and what it fetched. A medium that carries that record inside itself is not a threat to that function.

It is that function, automated, public, and no longer dependent on the survival of a filing cabinet.

Which is also, precisely, what Anne Bracegirdle proposed from this summit's own stage in 2018: a permanent, verifiable record of authorship, ownership and price, in place of an apparatus that is scattered, private and lossy.

Eight years later, the house called it wreckage.

Now read that against the guest list. Asprey Studio is a Zero 10 exhibitor. Adam Levine, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, is among the names Carollo lists as absent from the New York program.

Christie's had on its stage an artist whose practice is the entire argument of this article: a physical object and an on-chain film made as one work, held by a museum through the chain, exhibited at the fair section that has become the medium's center of gravity.

It gave her one panel, told the room in advance that the conversation was not about the technology underneath her work, and did not invite the museum.

What the category system shows

The absence has a date and a stated reason.

At the end of August 2025, Christie's closed its dedicated digital art department. Two staff members were let go; one specialist was retained in New York. Now Media reported it first; Artnet confirmed it on September 9. A company spokesperson said the house had made a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales, and that it would continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th and 21st Century Art category. Christie's did not respond to Artnet's request for comment on the staff reductions.

The timing should be stated fairly, because it is the strongest part of the house's case. The decision was taken at the bottom of a two-year contraction. Christie's fine art sales in the first half of 2025 came to roughly $1.5 billion — down 1.9 percent year on year, and down close to a quarter from the first half of 2023. A business shedding that much volume does not open departments, and the market for digital art had contracted further and faster than the market around it.

There is also a generous reading of the closure, and it deserves to be put at its full strength. Louis Jebb, formerly co-editor and managing editor of The Art Newspaper and now managing editor of Right Click Save, has argued that the positive interpretation was an admission that digital art is contemporary art and has been for a long time — that there is no longer any need to separate the two, and that folding the category into 20th and 21st Century Art amounts to encouraging the removal of unnecessary silos. That is a serious argument made by a serious editor, and it is the one Christie's would make about itself.

The position was restated on stage, at greater length and in the house's own words. Christie's Global Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, Max Carter, eventually addressed the NFT bubble directly — a subject that had dominated the summit only a few years earlier, particularly after Christie's own sale of Beeple's Everydays: The First 5,000 Days for $69 million in 2021. For a time, there was also a dedicated department at Christie's for digital artworks, which has since closed. "I'm actually very proud of what we did in that space, and that is probably surprising coming from someone with my background," Carter said. "We took a fairly advanced position on something that was still quite niche at the time. It then became much more mainstream, and we served a different group of clients. It was a very interesting learning experience." He remained firm that the initiative had helped introduce Christie's to new clients and generated knowledge about an emerging field — and that if the NFT boom is over, there is no reason to leave the field.

What is more surprising still, from a reporter who came from the classics, is that Carter went on to reject outright the idea that digital art is dead, comparing it to specialist categories that grow quieter under external conditions. The comparison he reached for was the house's Russian art department — a choice that, on the page, carries an atmosphere entirely of its own. Christie's, he said, can preserve its expertise and remain ready for a market revival.

That is a considered position, delivered by the person responsible for the category, and it deserves to be read at full strength rather than summarized into a sound bite. It is also, on its own terms, an argument for standby rather than continuity — expertise preserved against a future revival is not the same claim as a department serving a live market, and Carter does not claim the second.

Bonnie Brennan had addressed the decision the same way in an interview with The Value, conducted in Hong Kong in September 2025 and published on December 19, 2025. She said the market required the house to be nimble and responsive; that Christie's had retained a digital art expert; that the category now sits under the 20th and 21st Century Art department; and that artists including Beeple and Refik Anadol continue to generate dialogue, with some crossover interest from collectors of classical work. She noted that resources have to follow demand, describing Christie's, ultimately, as a small business.

All three accounts are coherent. All three should be taken seriously.

The five weeks before

The Refik Anadol sale Brennan cites is worth stating in full, because the calendar around it is the part that does not fit.

Living Memory: Messi — A Goal in Life was a one-of-one AI artwork made from Lionel Messi's favorite goal, the header that decided the 2009 UEFA Champions League final — seventeen points of the player's body mapped through an open-source motion-tracking framework, layered with biometric data into an eight-minute work at 16K resolution. It came with an artist's proof, an NFT, and a certificate of authenticity co-signed by Anadol and Messi. Proceeds went to nonprofits including the Inter Miami CF Foundation's partnership with UNICEF.

Bidding opened July 8, 2025, at $1.5 million. From July 12 to 22 the work was installed as a free public exhibition at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries — staged alongside the house's 2025 Art+Tech Summit. On July 22 it sold for $1.87 million.

Five weeks later, the department closed.

A dedicated single-lot sale. A ten-day public exhibition in the house's own New York galleries. A summit built around art and technology, running concurrently. The largest digital art result of the house's year. And then, at the end of August, the department that had built the category was dissolved.

Both things are true at once, and the house's own account holds them together: resources follow demand, and demand is measured in transaction volume. A $1.87 million charity lot does not sustain a department. That is a coherent position.

It is also the point at which the argument turns.

What the results table shows

A silo removed and a category absorbed are not the same event, and the difference is visible in the results table. On the house's own like-for-like measure, auction sales rose from $2.1 billion in the first half of 2025 to $3.5 billion in the first half of 2026. The contraction ended.

The department did not reopen. The category did not return to the table. Digital art is therefore not missing from the July 2026 results — it sits inside the $2,313M cluster, unbroken out, by design, since ten months before the release.

Removing a silo integrates a category. What happened here made it unreportable. A department that is preserved rather than developed produces no sales to report. A category that produces no sales to report cannot evidence the demand that would justify reopening the department.

All three positions rest on a single measure: transaction volume.

The channel. Not the medium.

Click. Scan. Type. Connect. - SurR.Ai - All the links. All the time. Any time.

SurR.Ai enters its fourth year in 2026.

The studio makes human-authored, AI-amplified phygital, or hybrid, art — work in which the physical object and its blockchain-secured record are made as one collectible — and has built an archive of more than 2,500 artworks since 2022. Its framework, Total Art + Tech, places movement and time-based art at the center and treats the blockchain as the record rather than the decoration: the mint as brushstroke, not receipt.

Through LV Agency, Inc., the practice advises on phygital collecting. How a physical and a digital form of the same work hold value together. How provenance is established at the point of making rather than assembled afterward from certificates and files. How a collection built across both can be structured, documented and held across generations.

Works from the archive are available in digital and physical form. New work is in production. The studio accepts commissions.

In September we return to NFT.NYC for a third consecutive year, as artist and speaker. An anniversary gathering is in development in Manhattan. Details will be announced.

The Future is Phygital!

Read the sequence: THE PHYGITAL TIMES H1 2026 ART+TECH REPORT (July 15) established the data. Art+Tech: The Third Category (LV Agency, Inc., July 29) made the full argument. Physical, Digital, or Phygital (Edition 109 of The Future of Collectibles, July 30) put the choice in front of collectors. Art+Tech: The Ledger and the Wave (The Phygital Times, August 6) delivered the four patterns beneath the season's numbers. What a Collection Carries (SurR.Ai, August 12) took the argument to family offices and estate counsel.

Sources

Christie's Art+Tech Summit 2026
– Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, "Christie's Art + Tech Summit 2026: Will AI Billionaires Save the Market?", ARTnews.
– Elisa Carollo, "Christie's Art + Tech Summit 2026," Observer, July 2026. Source for Max Carter's remarks on the NFT bubble, the closed digital art department, and the Russian art department comparison.
– Programming-time count is LV Agency's own, made session by session against the published program.

Christie's summits, 2018 and 2019
– Christie's inaugural Art+Tech Summit, London, July 17, 2018, Exploring Blockchain — Is the Art World Ready For Consensus?, co-organized with Christie's Education and Vastari. Keynote: Anne Bracegirdle, "The Blockchain Landscape in the Art World."
– Christie's Art+Tech Summit 2019, The A.I. Revolution, Rockefeller Plaza, New York, June 25, 2019, produced with Christie's Education and presented by Hyundai Motor. Hyundai Motor press release, April 18, 2019.

The Beeple sale
– Christie's, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, sale record, March 11, 2021.
– Eileen Kinsella, "An NFT Artwork by Beeple Just Sold for $69 Million at Christie's," Artnet News, March 11, 2021.
– "Beeple NFT Sells for $69.3 Million at Christie's," ARTnews, March 2021.
– Abram Brown, Forbes, March 11, 2021, on the fee split.

Augmented Intelligence
– Christie's, Augmented Intelligence, online sale, February 20 – March 5, 2025. Published results: $728,784 total against a $600,000 low estimate, 28 of 34 lots sold.
– The Art Newspaper, "Christie's AI art auction outpaces expectations," March 5, 2025.
– ARTnews, "Christie's AI Art Sale Defies Controversy, Surpasses Expectations," March 5, 2025. Source for bidder demographics: half Gen Z or Millennial, 37 percent new to Christie's.

Living Memory: Messi — A Goal in Life
– Christie's, dedicated online sale, bidding July 8–22, 2025; public exhibition at Rockefeller Center, July 12–22, 2025. Press release: Living Memory: Messi — A Goal in Life totals $1.87 million.
– Artsy, "Lionel Messi–inspired AI artwork fetches $1.87 million at Christie's," July 24, 2025. Source for the exhibition running alongside the Art+Tech Summit.
– Artnet News, on the work's construction and the co-signed certificate, updated July 22, 2025.
– Inter Miami CF press release on the charity structure and UNICEF partnership.

Department closure
– Jo Lawson-Tancred, Artnet News, on the closure of Christie's digital art department, September 9, 2025; first reported by Now Media.
– Bonnie Brennan, interview with The Value, conducted Hong Kong September 2025, published December 19, 2025.

Right Click Save / ART & TECH quarterly
– ART & TECH, No 001, Q2, April 2026, published by Right Click Save Ltd. Alex Estorick and Louis Jebb in conversation with Julianna Vezzetti.
– ART & TECH, No 002, Q3, July 2026, published by Right Click Save, Inc. Alexis de Bernède on the Centre Pompidou; Louis Jebb on NODE, on Refik Anadol Studio and Dataland, and on Anna Ridler and the Schwarzman Centre.
– rightclicksave.com

Centre Pompidou
– Centre Pompidou, "The Centre Pompidou in the age of NFTs," Pompidou+ — Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli, curators of the video, audio and new media collection.
– The Art Newspaper, "Paris's Centre Pompidou breaks new ground by acquiring 18 NFTs," February 14, 2023.
– Acquisition commission of the Musée national d'art moderne, January 18, 2023.
– Loi n° 2002-5 du 4 janvier 2002 relative aux musées de France, art. 11; Code du patrimoine, art. L. 451-3 and L. 451-5.

LACMA
– Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "LACMA Acquires Largest Collection of Blockchain Artworks," press release, February 13, 2023.
– ARTnews, "LACMA Has Acquired a Who's Who of Blockchain Art by Important Generative Artists," February 2023. Source for Cozomo de' Medici on the stigma attached to the term NFT.
– Artnet News, on LACMA's digital art acquisition fund and the Remembrance of Things Future initiative with Cactoid Labs, March 2023.

Art Basel Zero 10
– Miami Beach, December 2025 (12 exhibitors); Hong Kong, March 2026 (14); Basel, June 2026, The Condition (20), co-curated by Eli Scheinman with Trevor Paglen.
– Price range per THE PHYGITAL TIMES H1 2026 ART+TECH REPORT, July 15, 2026.

Kiya Tadele / Yatreda
– Twenty-First Century Akodama, silver crown made with Asprey Studio paired with a blockchain-minted film; shown at Zero 10, Miami Beach, December 2025.
– Abyssinian Queen, acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art.

Other institutional record
– ARTnews, "MoMA Adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles to Its Collection," December 2025.
– NODE Foundation, Palo Alto: opened January 23, 2026; CryptoPunks IP acquired from Yuga Labs, May 2025.
– Dataland, Los Angeles: opened June 2026, co-founded by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç.
– Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Oxford University: public arts programme launched April 2026.
– Toledo Museum of Art: first fully on-chain acquisition by a US institution, per Art Basel editorial by Duncan Ballantyne-Way, November 28, 2024.

Market data
– Art NFT trading volume 2021 and 2024; Christie's H1 2025 and H1 2026 results. Full citations in the flagship edition, Art+Tech: The Third Category.

Disclaimer

Independent editorial commentary published by SurR.Ai, a studio of LV Agency, Inc., New York, NY. LV Agency is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Christie's, Art Basel, Right Click Save, Observer, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, NODE, the Toledo Museum of Art, or any institution or individual named here. Factual assertions are drawn from published sources, listed in the Sources section above and, for the sequence's underlying data set, in the flagship edition. Passages characterizing significance or implication are opinion, offered as fair comment. Named professionals are cited for their published work and public statements, including direct quotations sourced to the publications indicated; their inclusion is not endorsement of this piece's argument, and any party named is invited to reply in full. The count of programming time at the Christie's Art+Tech Summit of July 16, 2026 is LV Agency's own, made session by session against the published program; it is not an official figure and has not been confirmed by Christie's. Nothing here is financial, investment, or legal advice. All marks belong to their owners. Corrections will be published promptly. Inquiries through LV Agency, Inc.