Beeple Crashes MakersPlace By Selling NFT Art for $1

NFT superstar Beeple crashed the crypto art boutique MakersPlace’s yesterday after traffic for his limited edition $1 drop led to system issues. Most of the 105 editions remain unsold.

In a tweet, MakersPlace apologetically explained that the website traffic at the time had completely exceeded its estimations, leading to a domino effect as the website went down and stayed down.

Why the excitement?

On Thursday, Beeple’s work appreciated in value when his Crossroad NFT— an Ethereum-based digital collectible—was resold to an anonymous purchaser on Nifty Gateway for $6.6 million. 

The piece was Beeple’s first 1/1, meaning it’s the only one of its kind, and it depicts a mammoth Donald Trump passed out naked and covered in graffiti on a grassy verge near a pedestrian walkway. Had Trump won the election, the picture would have been very different—the NFT’s code would have mutated it into a fiery Trump raging through a screaming city. 

Back when it dropped on November 1, Crossroad was purchased by ‘pablo,’ a longtime NFT collector known by his Twitter handle @pablorfraile, for $66,666.60, meaning the resale brought Pablo a hundredfold return on his initial investment. 

 Though it’s Beeple’s most expensive work sold at auction yet, it’s not his magnum opus. Over the last 13 years, Beeple has been creating one image every day for 5,000 consecutive days. He put every image into a collage called EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS and minted it into an NFT exclusively for Christie’s auction house. This makes Christie’s both the first established auction house to sell an NFT and the first to accept crypto.

The hype around EVERYDAYS was not misplaced. The piece attracted $1 million in bids within ten minutes of going on sale this week.

So what went wrong last night?

Beeple was teasing EVERYDAYS with another NFT release called The 5000 Day Selects, which features 333 images taken from the opus. At one dollar a piece, and limited to only 105 pieces on the blockchain, Beeple’s latest drop was feverishly anticipated. 

Unfortunately, the traffic the immensely popular digital artist brought to MakersPlace, a relatively small NFT marketplace, completely crashed the website, leading to “504 Gateway Time-out” notifications for anyone hoping to snap up the limited edition. 

MakersPlace quickly responded with a tweet explaining that “Given unprecedented amounts of traffic and last minute requests that we did not account for leading up to the drop, our site is unfortunately suffering from some system issues.”

In a pinned tweet a couple of hours later, the marketplace confirmed that “in the end, only a small number of artworks were purchased. We are finalizing.”

How is the situation getting resolved?

Both MakersPlace and Beeple acknowledged on Twitter that the crash was unfair on fans who’d gone onto the website at the right time hoping to nab a limited edition for themselves. 

The remaining editions of The 5000 Day Selects will be sold via a raffle. All collectors who showed up on time with a registered and verified MakersPlace account will be considered for the raffle.