On 1 May 2007 Mike Winkelmann (the artist Beeple) began producing one digital image every day — without exception. When the project, called 'Everydays', reached the 5000-day mark in January 2021, Beeple assembled those 5000 images into a single 21,069 × 21,069 pixel mosaic: *Everydays: The First 5000 Days*.

The work was minted as an NFT (non-fungible token) on the Ethereum blockchain — a cryptographic record of 'one-of-a-kind' digital ownership. The auction house Christie's offered it on 11 March 2021. It was the first major NFT a leading traditional auction house had ever offered. Bidding opened at $100; over a two-week online process the price climbed quickly; in the final hour it leapt from $9 million to $60 million. When the hammer fell: $69,346,250. The third-highest auction price for a living artist — behind only David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

Payment was made in Ether; the buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan, the crypto investor known as 'MetaKovan'. The work is nowhere physically — the owner holds a record of 'token ownership' at a blockchain address; the image file is freely downloadable from the internet.

The event opened deep debate in the art world: is what one buys with an NFT the 'work', or 'the record of ownership of the work'? Did the scarce, physical, institutional collection structure of the traditional art market have a counterpart in the digital economy? The NFT market collapsed sharply in 2022, but the 2021 sale had crossed a threshold: digital art could now count as 'valuable'. Beeple's work is read as a turning point in digital art history.

*Everydays* is also a piece of evidence for the power of daily digital practice: small but consistent effort, accumulated over 14 years, becoming a great dataset — and a work-archive.