Top NFT artist of all time, and how they creating the most expensive NFT arts and collections

Despite the recent problems crypto-world faced, it still remains popular and getting more attention. The crypto-currency market is famous not only for the money, but also for its artistic side - Non-Fungible Tokens.

The question is, what is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and what is the difference between “traditional” artist and an NFT one? At its core, NFTs are pictures or videos (less often photos, melodies, and 2D\3D animation) that are non-fungible crypto-tokens. Those arts are made by NFT artists - a person (both individuals and groups of people) who create them. You don’t have to go to special NFT school art and pass the exam to be the one. Even with basic knowledge on how to create content you can get into the NFT market, create such a token and put a price-tag on it.

Who puts the price on these tokens? Why are some ridiculously expensive while others cost less than a hot-dog? Who is the current Top NFT artist and what are the examples of the most expensive NTF pieces sold  at the moment? Such questions are worth answering, so let’s get started.

Starting to count – opening the top of best NFT artists

Let's get down to business and open the top 15 most successful NFT artists. Unfortunately, the only way to measure the success of an artist is by how well he sells his creations. Therefore, let's open the top 5 best selling artists and then go to the top-10.

We will also mention their most successful and, consequently, the most expensive creations. A separate criterion for success can also be considered the total cost of all creations sold by the artist. Who will open this top?

Refik Anadol

15th is occupied by Refid Anadol, an artist from Turkey who studies Terminators. To be more precise, in his works he studies machine intelligence and what new opportunities or tests artificial intelligence can put before humanity if it is ever created in the form most people think of it. The artist's most expensive NFT art is "Machine Hallucinations - Space: Metaverse", with the price of $2.3 million.

Slimesunday

14th place is occupied by the artist under the nickname Slimesunday, who studies censorship and fights against it with the help of surrealistic, and most oftenly quiet erotic creations. Slimesunday sold  8,000 of his NFTs, and the most expensive and best NFT creation, Gunky’s Uprising, was created in collaboration with  3lau and sold for $1.3 million, with a total value of all his creations estimated at $16.4 million. If you want to study one of the hottest NFT projects, take the children away from the screen and go to Slimesunday's official website, as most of his works are banned from showing on all popular social networks, because they are "too erotic".

WhisBe

WhIsBe (or “What Is Beauty") is #13 on the list and is a real lover of bears and marmalade, as most of his work consists of gummy bears, made in different styles and scales. WhIsBe started out as a street artist but soon became popular in the world of digital-art. The most valuable NFT work is "Not Forgotten, But Gone", sold for $1 million, while the total cost of all his creations is estimated at $18.3 million.

Mad Dog Jones

12th place is occupied by a Canadian who works under the pseudonym Mad Dog Jones. Most of his work is characterized by high dynamics and a high degree of surrealism (be careful - you can break your brain when studying his work!). In total, he managed to sell around 1600 of his NFTs, and his most expensive work is "Replicator", which is a 50-second looped video of an office copier located somewhere in a large city.

His highest selling NFT art was estimated at 4.1 million dollars, most likely because of the cat, which was next to the copier and purred all the time. After all, everyone loves cats! He sold NFTs for a total sum of 19.1 million.

MattDesl

Taking the 11th spot of the list is MattDesl aka Matt DesLauriers, who sold about 2000 pieces of his NFT creations. Most of his works are 3D animations and digital-arts with bizarre geometric shapes. His top sold NFT art - Meridian - was sold for 14.4 thousand dollars, and the total cost of his works - 22.1 million dollars.

10 most expensive NFT artists and their finest creations

The top-list has just started, and prices are already so high, but that’s not all, now we came to the top-10 NFT artists. Modern technologies and trends allow talented and persistent people to become recognizable without spending their whole lives working for reputation, while the “traditional artists” didn’t have such an opportunity, and their works often became valuable much later than their death. While during their lifetime most of them were extremely poor and often in debt, modern technologies and trends can greatly accelerate all these processes - so let's move on to the ten most popular NFT artists of our time.

Micah Johnson

The top ten is opened by Micah Johnson, who drifted from big baseball to the crypto-world and has already managed to sell almost 9,000 of his creations and became one of the most recognizable creators. His most famous works feature a young black boy wearing an astronaut helmet. The most expensive creation and his top NFT called "SÄ-V(Ə-)RƏN-TĒ" was sold for 305 thousand dollars, considered to be his most selling NFT, and the total cost of all his creations is estimated at 22.6 million.

Trevor Jones

Trevor Jones was a rather popular artist even before he became famous with his digital-arts. In 2017, after buying his first Bitcoin, he became so excited with all that crypto-thing that he decided to stay for a bit longer, having already sold about 6,000 of his top NFT arts in total and worked with some of the most famous NFT artists. The most expensive sold work - Genesis - was valued at 368.8 thousand dollars, and all his work is valued at 23.2 million.

Fewocious

Fewocious is one of the youngest, if not the most, NFT creators and represents one of NFT success stories, when a 19-years-old boy managed to become well-known and quite popular in just a matter of a couple of years. By now he managed to sell about 3,100 of his works, with his most expensive recorded sale, a famous NFT art “Nice to Meet you, I'm Mr. MiSUNDERSTOOD” rated and sold for 2.4 million. While all his sold works are estimated at 27.8 million dollars.

HACKATAO

HACKATAO ranks 7th and, unlike most other crypto-artists, creates both "physical" art, i.e. real paintings, and NFT. Main themes used in his works are crypto, society, the environment and humanity. The most expensive NFT "Imago, 2k2 a.C" was sold for 932.2 thousand dollars, among his top NFT sales, and in total his works are estimated at 28.7 million dollars.

Dmitri Cherniak

In sixth place is Dmitri Cherniak, who managed to sell about 900 NFTs, his top sold NFT art is Self Portrait #1, sold for $2.68 million. Dmitry creates abstract, colorful and geometric digital art, which in many respects has something in common with classic modern art, but with a slight addition of the author's vision of futurism. In total he managed to sell his works for 46.17 million dollars.

Tyler Hobbs

Tyler Hobbs is a visual artist who mainly designs with algorithms, plotters, and paint, has quickly become recognizable digital-artis and breaks into the top 5. In general, a little more than 1000 NFTs were sold, and his top NFT sale was “Incomplete Control”, valued at 81.2 thousand dollars. The total cost of the author's works is estimated at 53.7 million dollars.

Xcopy

XCopy - #4 in the top. The main theme of the author's creations is death and dystopian worlds, often accompanied by bright flickering and image loops. All Time High in the City - was his most expensive creation sold for 1.98 million dollars and is dedicated to Charon, a boatman who transports the souls of the dead to the afterlife across the River Styx. The total cost of all works - $54.8 million.

Snowfro

Erick Calderon aka Snowfro opens the top-3. His most expensive work was an edition of the "Chromie Squiggle", a piece from one of the popular NFT collections, which sold for 8.1 thousand dollars. In total, 7.7 thousand of his creations were sold. He managed to sell NFTs for a total sum of 68.2 million dollars.

Beeple

Second place goes to Mike Winklemann who goes by the nickname “Beeple”. His name you can see in most of the charts of the best NFT artist so far. Beeple has held first place for a long time with the most expensive NFT ever sold, and it was mainly him who started all that hustle and bustle around NFT. To be more precise, it all began with a Christie’s auction, where his highest paid NFT “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was sold for 69 million, becoming first NFT example sold via auction house, the first lot in history paid for by cryptocurrency and one of the top NFTs ever sold. He sold around 1,300 of his works for about 172 million dollars, almost all of them extremely realistic and absurd at the same time, as well as diverse in subject matter - from digital shapes to grotesque political illustrations.

Pak

Top spot is held by an anonymous person (or maybe even a group of people) hiding under the pseudonym Pak. Pak has been a digital artist for more than 20 years, and was one of the first artists who came to the NFT world when it was created, all this time remaining anonymous, and having managed to sell an absolute record of 66,000 of his NFTs. His best selling NFT art is "Clock" with a cost of $ 57 million, while not actually looking like a clock, but being a digital counter that counts the number of days WikiLeaks’ creator Julian Assange is held under arrest. The “Clock” was created in cooperation with Assange in order to make his arrest a more public matter and to collect donations for his protection.

Also, this work does not belong to a single person. Several thousand people donated money to a special fund that bought this NFT. The total cost of the author's work is estimated at a record $286.5 million, which makes him the most sold artist of all time.

Most expensive NFT art and their creators

We have already discussed many authors, but little attention has been paid to their creations. What determines the prices of NFTs in general, why do some of them cost a couple of bucks, while similar works are estimated at hundreds of thousands? Is it possible to become rich on NFT right now?

What affects the value of NFTs?

To begin with, let's briefly answer the first question - what determines prices? In short, the main pricing factors include:

1. Rarity. It is quite simple, because rare things are usually always expensive. Top NFT crypto tokens are usually very rare.
2. Popularity. The first factor is directly affected by this one. If the token was created by someone who is already famous and his works cost millions, then most likely a new token will also be rated that way. Popularity is influenced by several factors, for example, by the popularity of the author or group of creators, advanced advertising, and so on. Just take a look at the most popular NFTs to understand them better.
3. Usefulness. The last but not least criterion. Sometimes NFTs are created not "just because”, but for some purpose. An example is Pak with his work “Clock”, which was created to attract attention and raise funds for the protection of Julian Assange.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the cost of NFT is almost never influenced by its aesthetic value. No matter how “beautiful” or aesthetic the work is, its price will be determined by other factors anyway. But this is not a strict rule though, and there are sometimes creations among the NFTs that are more in line with classic paintings.

What are the top 10 NFTs? (H3)

The Top 10 NFT are:

1. CryptoPunk #7804 - $7.57 million. The collection was created by Larva Labs in 2017 and contains a solid amount of pixel “punks”. CryptoPunks is also considered to be one of the top NFT collections at the moment.
2. CryptoPunk #3100 - $7.57 million.
3. CryptoPunk #5577 - $7.7 million.
4. CryptoPunk #4156 - $10.26 million.
5. TPunk #3442 - $10.5 million. The punk is from one of the best NFT collections from Tron. This copy is one of the rarest and is presented in the form of the Joker.
6. CryptoPunk #7523 - $11.75 million.
7. CryptoPunk #5822 - $23.7 million. This one is the last in our top, we assure you! The last and most expensive in one of the biggest NFT collections ever created. Despite the fact that this collection is quiet old, 6 years-old to be precise, it still trades and punks just getting more and more expensive.
8. HUMAN ONE - $28.9 million. The first physical creation by Beeple. It represents a moving image of a spaceman endlessly walking somewhere and is made of 4 digital screens.
9. Clock - $52.7 million. The already mentioned work Pak created in collaboration with Assange to attract attention and funds to protect this famous journalist.
10. Everydays: The First 5000 Days - $69.3 million, the biggest NFT sale so far.

The information provided in this article is current as of January 2023, and in the future, new authors and creations could take the top spots!

FAQ

What is the most expensive NFT art right now?

“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple is considered to be the most expensive single-piece NFT ever sold for the price of 69.3 million. Someone may say that “The Merge” by Pak should be top-1 with the price of 91 million, but Merge is not a single-piece NFT with more than 1 person owning it.

What is the top NFT marketplace?

The most popular and reliable are OpenSea and NiftyGateway.

What are popular NFT collections?

Among the most tradable and popular collections are: “CryptoPunks”, “Mutant Ape Yacht Club”, “Bored Ape Yacht Club”, “Otherdeed for Otherside” and “Moonbirds”. All these collections are created on the Ethereum blockchain.

What are the top NFT collections right now?

Bored Ape Yacht Club is now a top-1 collection with 6148 units sold for a total sum of 908,000 ETH.

Who are the top NFT artists right now?

The top NFT artists are considered to be:

• Pak - around 66,000 NFTs sold for a total sum of 286 million dollars,
• Beeple - 1300 NFTs for 172 million,
• Snowfro  - 7,700 NFTs for 68 million.
• Fewocious - 3100 NFTs for 27 million.

What is the most popular NFT at the moment?

 

It is problematic to pinpoint the “most popular NFT”, but among those which are trending right now are: most valuable NFT collections like CryptoPunks (3668 units sold for 725,000 ETH), Bored Ape Yacht Club (6148 units sold for 908,000 ETH), Mutant Ape Yacht Club (12354 units sold for 376,000 ETH) and different works by most famous artists already mentioned in this article.

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