Top 15 Strangest and Most Expensive NFTs Ever Sold
 |
| Top 15 Strangest and Most Expensive NFTs Ever Sold |
| Table of Content |
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have recently exploded onto the popular culture scene. They have been around since 2014, but only in the last few months have they become such a sensation, with more and more investors and collectors becoming interested in this crypto-currency digital art form.
In the last year, NFTs have shot to the forefront of the crypto space. The cryptographically-unique tokens make it possible to create real-world scarcity for digital objects, and artists have seized on the opportunity presented by the technology.
The NFT market exploded in 2021, generating some $25 billion worth of trading volume, and the momentum hasn’t slowed so far this year. This list collects the 15 priciest single-NFT sales to date (in U.S. dollars), ranging from Beeple’s single-edition pieces to an array of CryptoPunks avatars—all of which have happened over the last year, as of this writing.
Check back often, as we’ll be updating this list with new entries as even more jaw-dropping NFT sales make headlines.
Top 15 Strangest and Most Expensive NFTs Ever Sold
1. Taco Bell
2. One Calendar Year Of Recorded Farts
3. Kevin McCoy, Quantum
4. CryptoPunk #5822
5. Emily Ratajkowski buys herself back
6. Fart symphony on the blockchain
7. CO2 negative NFT Soundbites
8. Little Chloe’s critical eye
9. The WWW now belongs to one person
10. The first Twitter tweet from 2006
11. Not meant for smoking pot: NFT cannabis plants
12. One color – just for me
13. The torched Banksy art
14. Marrying on the Blockchain – with NFT rings
15. Tennis player auctions off her own arm
********
1. Taco Bell
 |
| Photo: marketingpartnerships |
Sold for: US$69 Million
We love Taco Bells! But would you pay for a Taco that you can’t even have a bite of? Well, someone would and they did! The first one on the list of weirdest NFTs sold till date is Taco Bells with its taco-themed NFTs.
Taco Bell jumped the bandwagon of NFTs and sold its first collection of taco-themed NFTs for an astonishing price of US$69 Million. Although no matter how bizarre virtual fast food may sound, the act served a noble purpose where the proceeds from this sale went straight to the Live Mas Scholarship.
2. One Calendar Year Of Recorded Farts
Sold For: US$85
Now that you’ve eaten virtual food offered by Taco Bell, it seems you couldn’t digest it all and plan to sell the outcomes of your upset stomach. Yep, a fart! So? Would it sell? Yes, it would and it did at a price of $US85. Another weird NFT sold on the list of weirdest NFTs (which by the way, are still selling) is the collection of “One calendar year of recorded farts”.
As disgusting as it may sound, Mallis actually made NFTs of his farts and is selling them. We don’t know about you, but we definitely aren’t interested in hearing the symphony of farts. Good heavens, people are actually buying it! (the doom is near!)
3. Kevin McCoy, Quantum
 |
| Photo: sothebys |
Sold for: $1.58 million
The first NFT ever minted, Kevin McCoy’s Quantum came out of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference in 2014, when the artist and technologist Anil Dash were the first to have the idea of putting unique digital artworks on the blockchain. Made entirely with code, the animated Quantum is a shapeshifter, generating new forms on its own.
4. CryptoPunk #5822
Sold for: $23.7 Million
Since that inauspicious start, they’ve become the O.G. of NFT profile picture projects, inspiring an entire industry of followers—including the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Along the way, they’ve generated over $2 billion worth of trading volume, and yielded dozens of sales over the million-dollar mark—most notably, this one
CryptoPunk #5822 sold for $23.7 million worth of ETH in February 2022. The alien avatar type is the rarest of the bunch, with only nine of them in the entire collection, and this one sold to Deepak Thapliyal, CEO of cloud blockchain infrastructure firm Chain.
5. Right Click Save As Guy
 |
| Photo: cryptotimes |
Sold for: 7.09 Million
"Right Click Save As" became something of a joke among NFT detractors, the idea behind it being that NFT ownership seems superfluous when digital art can easily be copied and distributed at virtually no cost. Of course, NFTs could more accurately be thought of as receipts associated with art that cannot be replicated rather than the art itself, though the sentiment remains popular regardless of inaccuracy.
Interestingly enough, this piece was purchased by rapper and actor Snoop Dogg in December 2021 for just over seven million dollars. Snoop Dogg has been making waves in the NFT space by purchasing NFTs, real-estate space in the metaverse, and making NFT-related music.
6. Ringers #109
Sold for: 6.93 Million
Ringers is a collection of randomly-generated digital artworks created by Dimitri Cherniak, and many pieces of the collection have gone for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet, none are pricier than Ringers #109, which managed to pull in just under seven million dollars.
The Ringers collection is somewhat unique in that it makes use of the Art Blocks platform wherein artists create algorithms that create art instead of the art itself. Those buying into the Ringers series and others like it seem to be getting in on the ground floor of a notable new NFT movement.
7. Stay Free
 |
| Photo: yahoo |
Sold for: $5.4 Million
Edward Snowden became equally famous and infamous in 2013 when he leaked classified information from the NSA. Eight years after that drama unfolded, Snowden found himself in the spotlight again when he sold the Stay Free NFT for around $5.4 million.
Per the Foundation website where the NFT was sold, Stay Free "combines the entirety of a landmark court decision ruling the National Security Agency's mass surveillance violated the law, with the iconic portrait of the whistleblower."It's the only known NFT ever produced by Snowden, and 100 percent of the proceeds went towards the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to funding and supporting freedom of the press.
8. Grimes’s flying WarNymph babies
Sold For: $5.8 million
As mentioned, Grimes was one of the first celebrities to hop on the NFT bandwagon — not particularly surprising considering her baby daddy is tech mogul Elon Musk. Grimes, born Claire Boucher, sold a suite of her digital artworks as NFTs in late February, netting her a cool $5.8 million. But turning just one of those pieces, with 303 editions, into an NFT produced an estimated 70 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s about the equivalent of the electricity used by 10 homes in the course of a year. Yikes. At least the artist donated a portion of proceeds to Carbon180, an NGO focused on reducing carbon emissions.
9. Clock
Sold for: $52.7M
“Clock” is a piece of art that almost acts like a literal clock. However, instead of telling time, it’s counting the days that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spent in prison.
Assange himself created the piece in collaboration with the pseudonymous artist known as Pak. The goal of this NFT was to raise money to help fund Assange’s legal defense. Ultimately, it raised over $52 million when over 10,000 members of AssangeDAO joined forces to purchase the artwork. Assange DAO is an organization fighting for Assange’s freedom, and it was established solely to bid on “Clock.”
10. This Changed Everything
 |
| Photo: sothebys |
Sold for: $5.4 Million
It's safe to say that the creation of the Internet changed the world forever. What's the best way to memorialize its creation? Through NFTs, of course. Bidding for This Changed Everything began in June 2021 for $1,000. Once all was said and done, it sold to an anonymous buyer for roughly $5.4 million.
What did the buyer get for that price? They received an artistic take on the source code used for one of the earliest versions of the World Wide Web. This Changed Everything also came with a digital poster of code written by Tim Berners-Lee—commonly held to be the "father of the internet"—a letter written by him and time-stamped documents spelling out the history of the Internet.
11. Beeple’s Trump corpse
Sold for: $6.6 million.
Back in November, Mike Winkelmann, a.k.a. the digital artist Beeple, sold an NFT titled Crossroads that changed based on the outcome of the 2020 election. If Trump retained office, the artwork depicted him muscle-bound and naked, stomping through hell. If Biden won, the 10-second video would depict the 45th president’s lifeless and graffiti-covered corpse sprawled in a park. The first time around, someone bought Crossroads for $66,666.60, but in late February, it was resold on the secondary market for a whopping $6.6 million.
12. Winged War Babies
 |
| Photo: itigic |
Sold for: $5.8 million
Canadian artist and musician Grimes, who's better known as Elon Musk's on-again-off-again girlfriend, created 10 digital works of art: winged naked babies with tattoos and spears guarding the planet Mars. Are those babies in this dark and exceedingly weird scene protecting the planet from the colonization attempts of her ex? Who knows, but they sold for $5.8 million total.
13. Bored Ape #8817
Sold for: 3.14 Million
While collections like CryptoPunks earned praise for their ingenuity in 2017, by 2021, similar collections began to draw ire from those outside of the NFT sphere, as many believed them to be garish and unimaginative.
These sentiments didn't stop NFT trades from cashing in, however. In October 2021, Bored Ape #8817 sold for 819 ETH, or roughly 3.14 million dollars. One of a select number of gold apes in the Bored Apes line, #8817 is a rare commodity that's likely the envy of all those invested in the crypto trading space.
14. Digital Toilet Paper
 |
| Photo: futurism |
Sold for: $4,100
It seems like most people buying NFTs are in it to be cool, so it's a little surprising that someone actually bought digital toilet paper. Charmin minted NFTs featuring images or gifs of rolls of TP festooned with flowers or poop emojis and "enjoy the go." If you buy one, it comes with a physical display to hang by your toilet. All proceeds go to charity.
15. SMB #1355
Sold for: $2.1 Million
Solana is a blockchain that gained popularity with NFT creators thanks to its relatively low mint cost. The blockchain also featured a flagship NFT series known as Solana Monkey Business or SMB. Of these, SMB #1355 became not only the priciest of the collection but, as of October 2021, it was the most expensive NFT on the Solana blockchain.
The main draw is the crown atop the pixelated monkey's head, something only .02% of pieces in the Solana Monkey Business collection have. As more attention is drawn to the Solana blockchain, the value of this NFT is likely to grow substantially.
What is NFT?A non-fungible token (NFT) is a one-of-a-kind, non-transferable data unit kept on a blockchain, which is a type of digital ledger. NFTs can be linked to digital assets that can be reproduced, such as images, movies, and audio. NFTs use a digital ledger to offer a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but they leave the underlying digital files open to sharing and copying. NFTs are distinguished from blockchain cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin by their lack of interchangeability (fungibility). While some may have dismissed them as a fad, NFTs are showing no signs of slowing down, and the prices of some of the most expensive tokens are continuing to rise. It can be tough and financially hazardous to venture into the world of bitcoin and blockchain technology, but it has certainly paid off for these artists. It’s worth noting that only a small percentage of people succeed as NFT creators. |
 Top 10 Most Expensive NFT Art Pieces Ever Sold In the World NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens are unique objects that bear a certain value based on the object’s uniqueness. Which are the 10 Most Expensive NFT Art ... |
 Top 10 Most Popular NFT Marketplaces in the World Today NFT marketplaces are the hubs where the world’s highly valuable assets are traded. Which are the most popular NFT marketplaces in the world? |
 Facts About 'Everydays: The First 5000 Days' - World's Most Expensive NFT What is the most expensive NFT in the world? The most expensive digital artwork sold at auction is EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS by digital ... |
