Detail from "The Bitcoin Angel" by Trevorjonesart
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to talk about NFTs.
NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are blockchain-minted artworks with unique encryption codes which allow for verified authenticity and ownership. An NFT can be anything from a digital art piece to a song or whole album. Even fashion designers have gotten in on the NFT craze.
From 18-year-old Fewocious, to 87-year-old José Delbo, artists of all ages and from all over the world are entering the digital art-o-sphere. More than 509,000 NFT artworks were sold in March 2021 alone, totaling more than $85 million in sales, and while public interest has certainly waned since then, the cream of the crop will always be a solid investment for collectors.
See also: The 15 Most Expensive NFT Art Pieces Ever Sold
Interested in investing in some NFT art, but don’t know where to start? Cryptoart.io keeps a handy running list, ranking artists by total value sold. The data is pulled from a variety of digital platforms, including Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Foundation, MakersPlace, KnownOrigin and Async Art. We've also incorporated insights from leading NFT media brands like NFT Now. While the data is constantly changing, we compiled a list of the current 20 top-selling NFT artists for your convenience.
*Disclaimer: This list was last edited Sept. 11, 2023. This list is quite volatile as Total Artwork Value is calculated by the current conversion between USD and ETH. The re-selling of artists’ works can also impact their place on the list, and new releases every day also impact the top-grossing NFT artists. Check out CryptoArt and NFT Now for the most up-to-date info and standings.
Total Artwork Value: $293,187,232.98 / Website
Pak, an anonymous digital artist, is now ranked as the highest-grossing artist in the world of NFTs. Pak has been an active member in the digital media world for the past two decades and remains anonymous to this day. Having sold 66,682 of his own NFTs, his highest-selling NFT to date, titled Clock, sold for $20,232,912.15, which converts to about 16,593.059 ETH. The NFT may not look like a clock, but it’s actually a digital counter of the number of days WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has been locked up in London’s Belmarsh Prison. Pak and Assange worked together to create this NFT to help fund Assange’s legal defense.
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Total Artwork Value: $173,186,938.16 / Website
Mike Winkelmann, who goes by the artist name Beeple, topped the best-selling NFT artist list for a long time, following an historic auction with Christie's auction house. Selling for $69,346,250.00, the piece titled "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," was largely responsible for the mainstream media's coverage on NFT sales. This also marked the first time an established auction house sold crypto art and accepted cryptocurrency as payment.
With 1,354 pieces sold, he also posts daily digital creations on his Instagram, where his "Everydays" series continues. His pieces are highly realistic yet absurd, depicting everything from digital shapes and scenery to grotesque political illustrations.
Total Artwork Value: $99,067,005.25 / Website
Founder of Art Block, the generative art platform created to present and sell NFTs, Erick Calderon, known for his online handle Snowfro has moved up in the top NFT artist list quickly. Since its launch in November 2020, Art Blocks has received the attention of many people, including large names such as the auction house Sotheby’s. Snowfro has sold 7,777 pieces, and his most expensive piece, an edition of his Chromie Squiggle collection, sold for $8,129.59. The NFT features a squiggly line in dark blue tints which Snowfro explains “each squiggle embodies the soul of the Art Blocks platform”. No piece is the same in the Chromie Squiggle collection, Snowfro writing “consider each my own personal signature as an artist, developer, and tinkerer."
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Total Artwork Value: $77,993,777.53 / Website
A visual artist who primarily works with algorithms, plotters and paint, Tyler Hobbs has found a lot of success with NFTs. With 1,018 artworks sold, Hobbs’ highest price tag nabbed $81,227.67. "Incomplete Control," is all about letting go and allowing room for error and imperfections. Looking like exhibits from an art museum, Hobbs’ NFTs are definitely one of a kind pieces.
Total Artwork Value: $65,792,374.10 / Website
Having sold 924 NFTs, Dmitri Cherniak’s highest sale at $2,682,000.00 for his piece Self Portrait #1. That doesn’t mean it’s a portrait of the artist as a young man. Cherniak’s style is abstract, colorful and geometric, recalling much of the classic modern art movement but with a futuristic, digital edge.
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Total Artwork Value: $64,999,844.93 / Website
London-based digital artist and crypto enthusiast XCopy has sold 9,582 NFT pieces. Their work often depicts death and dystopian worlds, including a lot of loops and flashing images often paired with epilepsy warnings. His Super Rare piece, All Time High in the City, sold for $1,987,556.80 and appears to show a representation of Charon, the ferryman who brings the souls of the dead across the river Styx to the Underworld.
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Total Artwork Value: $32,176,572.04 / Website
Creating both physical and digital art pieces, Hackatao’s art pieces often involve issues of society, environment, humanity and crypto. Their highest priced NFT, Imago, 2k2 a.C, sold for $932,285.00 and features a nude woman with words and art printed all over her body. Some of Hackatao’s other work follow this theme, some being animated and others being still-image.
Total Artwork Value: $32,163,470.95 / Website
Matt DesLauriers, also known as MattDesl, has sold 2,075 works. With a wide range of NFTs, from 3D moving images to geometrical shapes, MattDesl’s large variety allows people with different artistic interests to enjoy his work. His most expensive work, Meridian, created landforms from many small strokes of color and sold for $14,427.69.
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Total Artwork Value: $28,680,234.44 / Website
Teen artist Fewocious is leading an NFT Renaissance. The 19-year-old is a pop surrealist digital artist who has taken the NFT and crypto world by storm. With more than 100,000 followers across Instagram and Twitter, the young artist has sold a total of 3,189 NFTs.
His highest-recorded sale, a piece titled "Nice to Meet You, I’m Mr. MiSUNDERSTOOD," depicts a sobbing character – seemingly lifted from a children’s show – as colorful swatches surround his body. Each piece is designed differently, with both pops of colors and monochromatic segments, and the created flowers and clouds bring to mind a fourth-grade diorama, made with a shoebox and plenty of shiny wax paper. The piece comes along with a 30x30 inch canvas, oil paint and gloss varnish. Currently, Fewocious is working on a clothing drop and a "few other things." Check out our full feature on Fewocious here.
See also: NFTs Enter Real Estate with Digital 'Mars House' Sold for $500,000
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Total Artwork Value: $23,625,011.90 / Website
Canada-born, Scotland-based artist Trevor Jones is "absolutely fascinated" with the art and tech connection. He started working on canvas before transitioning to QR codes and augmented reality. After buying his first Bitcoin in 2017, Jones became inspired with the power of crypto-technology and its intersection with art. Having sold a total of 6,074 NFTs, Jones has collaborated with some of the biggest names in NFT. Jones’ highest bidded piece is Genesis, a collaboration with Argentine comic book designer José Delbo, that depicts an animated painting of Delbo's Batman drawing, which sold for $368,856.40.
Total Artwork Value: $22,695,304.53 / Instagram
This Major League Baseball player-turned-artist entered the NFT space with Aku: The Moon God, a series of sculptures and digital art depicting a young black boy wearing an astronaut's hat. With 8,933 total sales, Johnson quickly became one of the field’s most recognizable names. His piece ˈSÄ-V(Ə-)RƏN-TĒ sold for $305,187.50. This image features an astronaut standing to the left of a door and two young African American boys standing on the other side of this door. Johnson mentions an encounter he had with a 7-year-old boy, Rayden, who believed he was not smart enough to be an astronaut. In response to this, Johnson created ˈSÄ-V(Ə-)RƏN-TĒ and with every contribution that is made toward the piece, 100 percent of the money will be given to Rayden upon his 18th birthday. “For centuries, the black community has been the target of a system designed to limit their power, their earning potential, their dreams” Johnson writes in the art piece description.
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Total Artwork Value: $19,053,401.94 / Website
The Canadian-born artist who goes by the name Mad Dog Jones is dynamic, adaptive and surreal. Combining music and art, Mad Dog Jones has sold 1,616 NFT artworks. Jones' highest selling piece, "Replicator," is a 50-second loop of a drawn scene of an office copier, located somewhere in a big city. The copier, accompanied by some self-timing lights and a cat purring on the floor, wakes up, completes a designated assignment, and puts itself back to sleep, before the cycle wakes itself up again. Explained as a “story through time,” the piece sold for $4,144,000.00 on April 23, 2021.
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Total Artwork Value: $18,306,395.10 / Website
With many bear-themed art pieces, this New York-based, anonymous artist has made a name for himself in the street art world and beyond. Known for his iconic gummy bear art, his work can be found in the new Museum in NYC as well as the MOCO Museum in Amsterdam. Inspired by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, his name stands for “What is Beauty” and, according to his website, “is once innocuous and sweet and introduces more substantive themes of cultural examination and subversion that underline much of his body of work.” His piece, “Not Forgotten, But Gone,” sold for $1,000,000 on March 16, 2021.
Total Artwork Value: $16,998,094.75 / Website
Artist Kjetil Golid has sold 3,586 NFTs. His most expensive piece was part of his Archetype collection. Sold for $14,843.16, it features a collection of geometrical rectangles and squares in tan and red. Golid’s Archetype collection has been described as both a utopian and dystopian world, with colors that are both bold, intense, and yet calming to the viewer.
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Total Artwork Value: $16,976,612.04 / Website
Founder of TBOA Club, Shvembldr has sold 3,635 art pieces. His artwork looks like something seen through a telescope, with some pieces looking like planets in outer space. Portal 03, which was sold for $300,494.88, features a kaleidoscope image that is filled with many colors. Not only did the buyer have full possession of the NFT, buying Portal 03 also gave the buyer membership into the TBOA Club. The club is a closed community filled with other generative artists.
Total Artwork Value: $16,957,137.61 / Website
Known for her Fragments of an Infinite Field collection, Monica Rizzolli's NFTs revolve around floral patterns and naturistic vibes. Her highest priced NFT sold for $11,480.65, and is a part of the Fragments of an Infinite Field collection. The NFT image includes a few flowers, which Monica discusses have a few different variables—such as macro aspects that affect entire populations, or micro aspects which affect each individual within that species differently. The themes of her art, both physical and digital, are impacted by the seasons, which plays a significant role in her creations.
Total Artwork Value: $16,340,329.70 / Website
Mixing geometry and unsettling realism, Rich Lord has sold a total of 1,423 artwork pieces. His animated NFTs are growing in popularity, fetching a watermark for Geometry Runners. The work features a semicircle rolling continuously forward in vibrant colors. This work is a bit different from his other pieces. Lord has created animated NFTs that show legs walking in a circle, fingers morphing into different shapes, even a creature with eyes that multiply all around its body.
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Total Artwork Value: $14,719,183.98 / Website
Based in Salem, MA, Slimesunday is a digital collage artist who explores censorship in his pieces and has sold more than 8,090 NFT pieces. His work has often caused quite a stir due to the nature of the topics he covers, and many of his pieces have been banned from different social media outlets for violating the terms and conditions. Other than his popular NFTs, his work can be seen in Playboy, Penthouse and Glamour Magazine. His piece “Gunky’s Uprising,” created in collaboration with NFT and electronic music artist 3lau, sold for $1,333,333.33 on March 28, 2021.
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Total Artwork Value: $13,083,846.20 / Website
Turkish artist Refik Anadol explores machine intelligence in his artwork and the new challenges and opportunities that come with artificial intelligence. He has sold 1,647 pieces, the most expensive being “Machine Hallucinations – Space: Metaverse” which sold for $2,382,250.00 on October 4, 2021. When he’s not creating art, he’s running Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB in Los Angeles which focuses on “discovering and developing trailblazing approaches to data narratives and artificial intelligence,” according to his website, as well as lecturing at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.
Total Artwork Value: $12,362,613.50 / Website
Darien Brito is a creative coder and audiovisual artist who works with sound, image and algorithms. His artwork features images and videos that look as though they were taken from outer space while also incorporating three-dimensional algorithmic images. Brito has sold 1,675 art pieces, ranging from videos to images, and his pieces now average $7,610.09 a piece. His piece Pigments, an other-worldy art piece, was bought for $11,429.50 and incorporates “an exploration of colour and spatial distortion.” A lot of Brito’s pieces are animated, so the viewer can experience the images live.
Now that you know the highest-selling NFT artists, you can invest without stress. Curious to learn more? Check the list of the most expensive NFTs ever sold.
Photography by: TrevorJonesArt
