The Covid-19 pandemic has hit artists like Cam Rackham hard. The 42-year-old Huntington Beach, Calif., artist has seen his entire lucrative venture take a hit — art shows have been canceled, sales have slowed, and his commissions have dried up.
So Rackham turned to the world of digital art.
Until 2021, the most money Rackum made selling a piece of his art was $11,000 for a painting and sculpture he sold in 2015. But that quickly changed after Rackam began creating digital art in the form of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
Rackham told CNBC Make It that he saw the success of NFT’s popular art collections, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the $69 million NFT Beeple project, and decided it could be an interesting and lucrative space for him.
“I realized that by being able to see all your clients on the blockchain at the same time, you can start doing some really interesting things with it,” Rackham told CNBC Make It. “I started having crazy ideas.”
His digital art launch began when Wreckum 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 Rackham created thousands of iterations of the Wall Street-themed cartoon bull.
With Rackam developing the art and the meme page boosting sales by spreading the word through digital channels like Discord, the duo sold their entire collection of 10,000 NFTs in 32 minutes of launch on October 27, 2021.
“In the first five minutes, about 2,250 of them left,” Rackham said. “But then I realized that by the eighth or ninth minute we were more than halfway done. I started thinking, “Oh my God, we’re going to sell this thing really hard.”
The collection cost 660 Ethereum, which at the time of sale equaled $2.6 million (as of Friday, this amount will be worth closer to $1.7 million). However, Rackham’s share that day was $738,593.97.
Rackham says he celebrated by drinking champagne and playing music at his Huntington Beach home.
“I got a little pissed off, I started screaming. I called people, yelled into the phone,” Rackham said. “I lit a cigar at home and opened a bottle of champagne.”
“Neighbors probably thought it was some kind of rage, but it was just one artist moving into a new environment,” he added.
Rackum is far from the only artist to have success selling NFTs. At the end of 2021, digital asset sales reached $17.6 billion, irritating some critics concerned about the destruction of the traditional art world.
Meanwhile, many market researchers also warn that the NFT market has already become oversaturated, with a combination of massive hype and speculation causing prices to hit extreme and erratic highs.
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