Damien Hirst is set to burn thousands of his paintings as part of a year-long NFT project called The Currency.
Starting in September, visitors to Hirst’s private London museum will be able to view some of his 10,000 oil paintings depicting unique dots he created in 2016 and linked to NFTs in 2021.
Buyers of the $2,000 floor-priced NFTs were given the option to keep the token or trade it for the physical painting. The original artwork will be burnt for those who chose to keep the NFT version. The deadline was July 27, with nearly half of the collectors, wanting their paintings burned for digital edition NFTs, while the rest of the collectors opted to trade their NFTs for physical versions.
The art will be torched daily during the run of the event beginning on September 9, culminating in its closure during the London Frieze Week event in mid-October, when the remaining paintings will be burnt.
The initial sale and subsequent secondhand resales have been handled by NFT marketplace Heni. According to Heni, sales surged in August and September 2021 when the project launched. The Currency became the top collection in OpenSea NFT rankings on August 15. However, volumes have slumped in recent months with the broader crypto market crash.
The maximum price for a piece was $176,779, with the average buyer spending $21,078. The most recent sale was on July 28 for $8,708 USDC, bringing the total sold for the collection to $89.3 million.
