Just been diving into the NFT market history and honestly, some of these valuations are wild. Pak's The Merge is still the most expensive nft ever sold - hit $91.8 million back in December 2021. What's crazy about it though is that it wasn't bought by one collector. Instead, 28,893 different people each grabbed pieces of it, purchasing 312,686 units at $575 each. Pretty innovative approach to distribution.

Beeple was absolutely dominating the space around that same time. His Everydays: The First 5000 Days went for $69 million at Christie's in March 2021, which was insane considering it started with a $100 opening bid. The guy literally created one digital artwork every single day for 5000 days and compiled them into this massive collage. MetaKovan ended up buying it with 42,329 ETH.

Then there's Pak's Clock - another most expensive nft contender at $52.7 million. This one's different though, it's not just art for art's sake. Pak collaborated with Julian Assange on this piece, and it's literally a timer counting the days of his imprisonment. Updates every day. AssangeDAO, a group of over 100,000 Assange supporters, pooled together to purchase it. The proceeds went to his legal defense. Pretty powerful statement about what NFTs can do beyond just being collectibles.

Beeple's Human One was another massive sale at $29 million - it's this 7-foot kinetic sculpture with 16K video displays that changes based on time of day. Beeple can remotely update it, so it's basically a living artwork that evolves over time. Christie's auctioned it in November 2021.

Now, if we're talking about what's consistently expensive, CryptoPunks are absolutely the blue-chip NFT collection. CryptoPunk #5822 - the alien one - sold for around $23 million. These were some of the earliest NFTs, launched back in 2017 on Ethereum. There are 10,000 unique avatars in the series, and the rarest ones command ridiculous prices. Other expensive punks include #7523 (the one wearing a medical mask) at $11.75 million, #4156 at $10.26 million, and #5577 at $7.7 million.

TPunk #3442 is worth mentioning too - Justin Sun grabbed it for $10.5 million in August 2021. It's part of the Tron blockchain derivative of CryptoPunks, and Sun's purchase basically sent the whole collection into overdrive. Collectors went nuts trying to grab these after that.

XCOPY's Right-click and Save As Guy sold for $7 million to Cozomo de' Medici. The name itself is kind of a joke - people think you can just right-click and download NFTs, so XCOPY basically made that the title. Originally sold for 1 ETH (around $90) back in 2018.

Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers #109 is the most expensive nft on the Art Blocks platform at $6.93 million. The whole Ringers series is generative art made of strings and nails, and even the cheapest ones now run about $88,000.

There's also Beeple's Crossroad from February 2021 - $6.6 million for a 10-second film responding to the 2020 US election. Pretty wild that something so short could fetch that much, but Beeple was already making waves at that point.

What's interesting is that when you look at total collection sales rather than individual pieces, Axie Infinity leads with $4.27 billion and Bored Ape Yacht Club sits at $3.16 billion. So even though we talk about these individual most expensive nft sales, the real money is in established collections.

The whole space has evolved crazy fast. From 2017 when CryptoPunks launched to now, we've gone from free NFTs to hundred-million-dollar sales. Some people think it's a bubble, others see it as the future of digital ownership. Either way, the market's definitely proven that people value unique digital assets.

One thing to note though - about 95% of NFTs out there have basically zero value. The market's incredibly concentrated around blue-chip collections and established artists. So if you're thinking about getting into NFTs, reputation and uniqueness really do matter.