Just went down a rabbit hole on NFT history and honestly, the numbers are wild. We're talking about some truly mind-blowing sales that shaped the entire digital art space.

So Pak's The Merge is still holding the crown as the most expensive NFT ever sold. December 2021, $91.8 million. What's crazy about it though is that it wasn't bought by one collector. Instead, nearly 29,000 people each purchased different quantities, with each unit priced at $575. The more you bought, the larger your piece of the final artwork. It's actually a genius concept when you think about it, and that collaborative approach is probably why it hit such an insane valuation.

Then you've got Beeple, who basically dominated the early NFT boom. His Everydays: The First 5000 Days went for $69 million back in March 2021, and get this—it started with a $100 opening bid. But once collectors realized what they were looking at, the bidding went absolutely crazy. The piece is literally 5,000 individual artworks compiled into one massive collage, created over 5,000 consecutive days starting from 2007. That's dedication.

Beeple also has another one on the list—Human One for $29 million. This one's different though. It's this 7-foot kinetic sculpture with a 16K video display that changes throughout the day. Beeple can actually update it remotely, so it's basically a living artwork. Pretty innovative.

Now, if you're looking at the most expensive NFT collections overall, CryptoPunks absolutely dominated. These 10,000 unique avatars launched on Ethereum back in 2017, and some individual pieces went for insane amounts. CryptoPunk #5822, the alien-themed one, sold for around $23 million. Then there's #7523, the alien with the medical mask, which went for $11.75 million at Sotheby's. The rarest ones, especially the aliens and apes, just keep breaking records.

What's interesting is that the most expensive NFT sales tell you a lot about what collectors value: scarcity, artist reputation, and innovation. Pak's Clock, created with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, sold for $52.7 million in February 2022. It literally has a timer counting the days of Assange's imprisonment, updating daily. That's not just art—that's activism.

There's also XCOPY's Right-click and Save As Guy for $7 million, which is kind of meta when you think about it. The whole joke is that people think you can just right-click and save NFTs, so the artist literally made that the title. Sold it to Cozomo de' Medici, one of the biggest collectors in the space.

Looking at the broader picture, Axie Infinity and Bored Ape Yacht Club have generated the most total sales volume by collection. But when it comes to individual pieces and the most expensive NFT records, it's definitely the one-off art pieces and the early CryptoPunk variants that command the crazy prices.

The whole space has evolved so much since those early days. We've gone from artists not knowing how to price their work to seeing $90 million+ sales. Whether you think NFTs are here to stay or just a bubble, you've got to admit the innovation around digital ownership and provenance is pretty significant. The most expensive NFT sales we've seen so far are basically the proof points that digital art has real value in the market.