A drop of ten works by the musician Grimes — flying cherubs with weapons over ruined landscapes, under the name WarNymph — that sold a reported $5.8 million in about twenty minutes on Nifty Gateway in February 2021, days before the Beeple sale. The first celebrity NFT sale most people read about, and the one that fixed the word 'drop' in the general vocabulary.
A Reuters brief on the sale, February 2021, which needed a paragraph to explain what a non-fungible token was before it could report that Grimes had sold some. The record notes that paragraph became a standard fixture for a year.
Died when the drop ended, as drops do. The cherubs still exist and the number was overtaken within a fortnight, but the record notes it was the first six-million-dollar afternoon for a musician's JPEGs, and the last time that was surprising.
Winged babies with swords, sold as open editions and one-offs by a pop star, with a soundtrack. The record files it under 'first' and notes that the babies were, for a fortnight, the face of the entire idea.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
