The buyers who bought 10,000 NFTs for $2,000 each have been asked to choose whether to keep it or trade it for physical work. If the former is burned, the painting will now be displayed. The works are due to be destroyed daily during the run of the show, culminating in a closing event during Frieze Week in October when the remaining paintings will be torched.
4,751 people swapped their NFT for physical work at the time of publication, with 5,249 buyers set to retain their NFTs, with less than a day left to decide.
Hirst described the project as his most exciting by far, and said in March that it touches on the idea of art as a currency and a store of wealth. He added: This project explores the boundaries of art and currency when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art. It's not a coincidence that governments use art on coins and notes. They do this to help us believe in money. Without art, it's hard for us to believe in anything. Hirst has been using the market as his medium for a long time. In 2007 he made For the Love of God, a sculpture consisting of a platinum cast of an 18th century human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds. In a move that predated the current trend for tokenizing art, the work was sold for 50 million in August 2007 and around $100 million, according to Hirst, who claimed to be part of a consortium that included the artist himself.
In 2008, during the week that Lehman Brothers crashed and the global economy went into meltdown, Hirst sold 218 works directly from his studio to Sotheby's auction house for 111 million dollars and $200 million. Not only was the event unprecedented in scale and ambition, but it also cut out the gallery middleman and ultimately flooded Hirst's market, which has never recovered.
Since the project began, and as cryptocurrencies have plummeted, Heni, the NFT marketplace that handled the initial sale, has been producing a monthly report analyzing the buying and selling of Hirst's NFTs on the secondary market. Between July 30 and August 31, 2021, there were 2,036 sales of The Currency, totaling $47.9 million, according to the first report. In June of this year, just 170 sales took place, bringing in a total of $1.4 million.
The resale of physical works seems to be doing well. One of the original paintings sold for 18900 $23,000 at the Phillips auction house in London in January.