To be fair, if you owned the rights to Nyan Cat, it would have some value just from a stock perspective. It as least has some history and predated the market where someone could have created it in anticipation of leveraging its value in this way.

To be fair, if you owned the rights to Nyan Cat, it would have some value just from a stock perspective. It as least has some history and predated the market where someone could have created it in anticipation of leveraging its value in this way. - Dann

True, good point. Just seems odd that I can just download it from here and it's mine and I didn't pay anything for it. Mind you I don't have the native files used to create it which would be cool but $500K cool? Not sure.

And I suppose it would be more valuable if you had the legal rights to it too. We're in a bubble, so the prices are probably going to even out at some point, but the fact that the NFT is guaranteed to be JUST this one instance, even if it's digital, has some legitimacy I guess. There's also some other interesting things about the digital nature that may allow for breadcrumbs, history tracking, residual royalties (hello pyramid schemes).

Looks like minting costs average about $25/item, so I'm almost tempted to go through the process just as a learning exercise.

And I suppose it would be more valuable if you had the legal rights to it too. We're in a bubble, so the prices are probably going to even out at some point, but the fact that the NFT is guaranteed to be JUST this one instance, even if it's digital, has some legitimacy I guess. There's also some other interesting things about the digital nature that may allow for breadcrumbs, history tracking, residual royalties (hello pyramid schemes).

Looks like minting costs average about $25/item, so I'm almost tempted to go through the process just as a learning exercise. - Dann

True the legals rights and royalties.

Yeah $25 doesn't seem bad.

Heritage Auctions recently held an event for Anime cels that pulled in $2.1m, which is very impressive. A summary article of the auction can be found here:

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/heritage-auctions-anime-art-auction-breaks-2-1-million-record/

I've been monitoring the auction and was surprised at some of the prices. The seminal movie Akira did very well for itself. As expected, the cels that featured the iconic red motorcycle pulled in the most money ($60-73k). I figured it would've hit a ceiling at $50k. Astro Boy cels did surprisingly well, too.

Good to see such activity for this market where record prices are pretty much dominated by Disney and Studio Ghibli pieces.