The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on artists like Cam Rackam. The 42-year-old artist from Huntington Beach, California has seen his entire money-making business suffer – art exhibitions have been cancelled, Sales slow down and his commission runs out.
So Rackam turned to the world of digital art.
Until 2021, the most Rackam has made from selling a piece of his own art is $11,000 for a painting and sculpture he sold in 2015. But that’s quick. changed after Rackam started creating digital art like NFTor non-edible tokens.
Rackam told CNBC Make It that he has seen the success of popular NFT art collections, such as Bored Ape . Yacht Club and Beeple’s $69 million NFT projectand decided that it might as well be an interesting – and lucrative – space for him to explore.
“I realized that being able to see all your customers on the blockchain at once, you can start doing some really interesting things with it,” Rackam told CNBC Make It. “I started getting some crazy ideas.”
His start selling digital art began when Rackam reached out to a popular Instagram meme page called @wallstmemes and asked if they would like to collaborate on the NFT collection. They agreed, and Rackam created thousands of iterations of a bull in a Wall Street-themed cartoon.
With Rackam designing the art and meme pages driving sales by promoting on digital channels like Discord, the duo sold their entire 10,000 NFT collection in 32 minutes of its launch on October 27, 2021.
“In the first five minutes, about 2,250 of them were gone,” Rackam said. “But then I realized by the eighth or ninth minute, we were more than halfway there. I started thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re going to sell this super hard.'”
The collection was worth 660 Ethereum, or $2.6 million at the time it went on sale (as of Friday, that would be worth nearly $1.7 million). However, Rackam’s drop on that day was $738,593.97.
Rackam said he celebrated by drinking champagne and playing explosive music at his home in Huntington Beach.
“I panicked a bit, I started screaming. I was on the phone with everyone, staring at the phone,” Rackam said. “I light a cigar in the house and open a bottle of champagne.”
“Neighbors might think it’s some kind of cropping machine, but it’s just an artist transitioning into a new medium,” he added.
Rackam isn’t the only artist to succeed in selling NFTs. Sell digital assets reach $17.6 billion by the end of 2021messed up some feathers among the critics concerns about disruption of the traditional art world.
Meanwhile, many market researchers also warn that the NFT market has has become oversaturatedwith the combination of exaggeration and great speculation pushing prices to excessive and unsustainable highs.
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