Mohamed-Amin Atch, Mohamed Rilaz Waleedh, and Daood Hassan, all 23 years of age, were charged on allegations of running a scam with false promises the purchase of the Evolved Apes NFTs would help develop a video game.

According to a recently published announcement from the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the suspects took the investor funds of $2.7 million from thousands of people in 2021 and pocketed the proceeds to personal accounts.

In the cryptocurrency industry, this type of scam is known as a “rug pull.”

It involves the advertising and sale of a digital project to public investors, the collection of funds, and then quietly shutting down the project or suddenly disappearing. The three suspects allegedly created and promoted the NFT project “Evolved Apes.”

The promises for the profits of the project included Ethereum cryptocurrency tokens added to a community wallet; as well as donations to charities “supporting endangered apes”, “fighting global hunger” and “creating prosthetic limbs”.

The creators and promoters of the Evolved Apes project sold the “10,000 unique” NFTs and collected a reported $2.7 million from purchasers through public promises the money raised would be used to develop a videogame based on the digital images. The accused suspects claimed the videogame would increase the value of the NFTs. But the project’s videogame never happened and its website was shut down.

According to Coindesk, which first reported news of the unsealed indictment, the project’s anonymous developer Evil Ape “vanished a week after launch, siphoning 798 ether ($3 million at today’s price, $2.7 million at the current time) from the project’s funds.”

According to US Attorney Damian Williams and FBI New York Field Office Assistant Director James Smith the funds were transferred through multiple cryptocurrency transactions to the personal accounts of Atcha, Waleedh, and Hassan.

The charges—one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering—each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The charges were announced on June 6 due to the indictment against Atcha, Rilaz, and Hassan being unsealed.

Across the book’s 12 chapters, Small guides readers through the roller coaster of NFT hype, and its associations with the boom-and-bust and regulatory concerns of cryptocurrencies. Tyler Hobbs, Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), Justin Aversano, and Erick Calderon, the founder of generative art platform Art Blocks, are Small’s protagonists of the 2021 boom, taking readers from Christie’s record-breaking auction of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days to the unexpected synchrony, a year and half later, between Art Blocks’ Open House in Marfa, Texas and Sam Bankman-Fried’s resignation from FTX, the now-bankrupt crypto exchange and hedge fund.

Small’s telling contains engaging anecdotes and the occasional digression to art historical antecedents—the evolution of photography and Donald Judd settling in Marfa—that provide obvious cultural references to anchor readers in this emergent technology. But for someone who participated in and was a close observer of the NFT boom, Token Supremacy seems mostly to reiterate popular magazine articles without providing significant new research or insights. This deficiency is underscored by Small’s goal, outlined in the introduction, to contribute to the history of cultural economics and the dynamics of speculation. There is much to say about the gnarly web that links artists, platforms, hedge funds, venture capitalism, regulation, and global finance, but it is not to be found in the four case studies and breezily recounted recent history that form this book. The shortfall between the book’s stated aims and its execution led me to wonder if Token Supremacy had not tried to fulfill the demands of two audiences: to present the art world’s particular usury in its dealings with crypto for those with some knowledge of both art and crypto and, at the same time, provide a Vanity Fair-esque retelling of NFTs that could credibly be a beach read.

The demands of the latter lead Small to truncate important events, eliding their deeper complexities. For example, in the book’s first chapter, while Small recounts the desires of and the difficulties faced by the Christie’s employees driving the Beeple auction in March, they bypass telling how, several months earlier, Metapurse, the crypto-focused venture capital fund, sold fractionalized ownership stakes in 20 Beeple works as part of its B20 coin investment scheme. It isn’t mere trivia that Metapurse was then the buyer of Everydays for nearly $70 million, but material to why they had a vested interest in driving up Beeple’s prices. And while Everydays served as a kind of advertisement for B20, those works were not added to the coin investment scheme, as initially reported by Amy Castor. The B20 coin and Everydays would be an ideal case study in speculative tokenomics, and might have been used to explain how insider knowledge and “rug pulls” (where a group draws investors, only to abandon the project) operate within NFTs and crypto markets. Small, however, does not illuminate this connection or its implications.

Further, there is insufficient discussion of the dangers or negative impact that centralized marketplaces like MakersPlace or OpenSea had, nor the model they are based on: the decentralized platform Rare Pepe Wallet, established in 2017, which evolved from the Pepe the Frog, the cult internet meme that went from slacker icon to far right co-optation and, eventually, subsequent reclamation, partly via two Asian projects.

Another important financial feature deserving of greater analysis is resale royalties—Hobbs took in $9 million after an initial $400,000 sale at Bright Moments in 2021, as Small identifies—that were fought for by a group of artists led by Matt Kane in 2020. That recompense was lost during the spiraling of 2022 when marketplaces dubiously claimed they could not sustain it. Similarly, though Small mentions DAOs at regular intervals, unmentioned are the early experiments by artists (like Jonas Lund or Primavera de Filippi), the research initiative and insightful publication led by Furtherfield in London, the 2021 Wyoming legislation recognizing them as legal businesses, or the venture capital funding that was poured into incubators and accelerators. This might have provided insight into how hedge-fund money moved markets within the space, created packages or derivatives, including the possibility of shorting cryptocurrencies, which may have accelerated the crash while still producing a profit for a small percent of financiers. Such investigation would be worthy and meaningful not only to this NFT example but to understanding dangers in current market operations, especially for art’s increasing deployment as an investment vehicle. That would have required more than cocktail parties and dinners with “large burrata salads, wine, and mojitos” ending in “a taxicab headed back uptown” (as Small describes a moment returning from a Quantum Art dinner with artist Justin Aversano), which sounds more Sex and the City than To Catch and Kill.

It is true that, say, Winkelmann and Calderon represent obvious figures within the boom market of that moment, though others like Dmitri Cherniak, Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe, Sarah Meyohas, or the collective and creative platform DADA could have widened the lens on the impact of surging interest in NFTs and offered a more global perspective. For example, Cherniak is a leading artist who donated the revenue from Dead Ringers: Edition in February 2022 to the NYC Food Bank, providing 16 million meals (a value of approximately $3 million); Osinachi is a Nigerian artist whose work celebrates LGBTQ people in a nation with some of the harshest anti-gay laws and who launched an incubator to help onboard others into digital art; Meyohas produced Bitchcoin in 2015, before Ethereum, and garnered renewed interest in fractionalized work and her market; DADA was created by Judy Mam and Beatriz Ramos to connect participants through a shared digital drawing practice, which developed into an exercise in “the Invisible Economy” that seeks to distribute funds to the community as basic income.

Citations in Token Supremacy are sometimes peculiar and often unclear. Small never cites Zsofi Valyi-Nagy on Vera Molnar, though she is very likely the leading scholar on the artist, nor Amy Whitaker, a prominent author on the art market with research as early as 2019 exploring blockchain use cases for art. Though the book’s interviews are initially introduced with date and place, when interspersed with information and quotes from other articles, it becomes difficult to discern Small’s contributions from the established information. For example, in Chapter 3, they recount the heist of 309 CryptoVenetians from the Bright Moments DAO and gallery, but despite having spoken to participants, the tale seems largely cobbled together from Matthew Leising’s three-part series for Decential Media. In Chapter 2, Small tells the Berlin backstory of Jonathan Monaghan’s Mothership, an early proto-NFT, and McCoys’ Quantum, but the Quantum dispute was explored in reporting by media outlets during the court case, including ARTnews. In addition, they write in this section that Sotheby’s head of digital art Michael Bouhanna’s “poor skills of observation and historical knowledge about digital art would push the NFT market towards destruction.” Whatever one may think of Bouhanna or the auction houses, that description seems like overreach.

Sometimes quotes from articles misrepresent the speaker and the article’s original context. At the height of the NFT boom in March 2022, critic Blake Gopnik wrote in the New York Times that Tina Rivers Ryan, then-curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and now editor-in-chief of Artforum, suggested that “the new world of tokens may instead bring about ‘an impoverishment — and not just of digital art, but of art full stop, because it reduces art to being a frictionless commodity,’” with that quote within his text being hers. Small shifts Gopnik’s moderate sounding “may instead bring about” to a definitive and indicative present tense: “NFTs are “an impoverishment…”” This alters Ryan’s likely intent, given that she continues in Gopnik’s article to point out good examples of presenting NFT art. This is the kind of confusion that mitigates confidence in the book overall.

The lack of citations around certain claims becomes more problematic when alluding to major museums: “The investors who had spent lavishly during the bull market had drained their accounts, leading to embarrassing situations when these crypto ‘millionaires’ who pledged generous donations in exchange for seats on acquisition committees at museums like the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art were booted after failing to pay their dues.” In answering questions about this, Angela Montefinise, the Whitney chief communications officer, explained in an email: “At the Whitney, acquisition committee members are invited based on their expertise. We have not had anyone removed from our acquisition committees for any reason, including failing to pay dues. This has not happened.” Similarly, Jessica Young, director of communications for LACMA wrote in an email, “This claim about the museum is absolutely not true and does not align with the standards of the acquisition committee and our institution.”

(Small, for their part, told ARTnews in an email, “That is contrary to what members of their own museum boards told me in the course of reporting this story.”)

Nevertheless, art and money, which are seemingly accessible to anyone, have this elusive quality that cultivates a kind of voyeurism; good narratives allow us behind the veil. Readers will find titillating moments. There are beautiful sentences in which meaning is not particularly important: “There in the digital filing cabinet is a sleepless delirium, an insomnia that turns the art-money into a parade of hallucinations that dance on the fence posts dividing perception and imagination.” Some art world readers will wonder why basics, like the Venice Biennale, are being explained, but may want greater detail on the regulatory blockades, given the ongoing discomfort with increased Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations overseas. Some general audiences may wonder why those museums that famously did collect NFTs during this period aren’t examined in greater depth.

But, as Small writes, “the best strategy for fooling wealthy people into buying art is to make them feel insecure before throwing economic data in their face.” There are a lot of facts and data thrown about in Token Supremacy but they don’t add up to much. For a moment in art deserving of such a cultural studies perspective, it is unfortunate for all the artists, galleries, museums, investors, critics, and audiences of the period that this book is a crash landing.

In the meantime, two other books have been released this year by participants in the current art economy: On NFTs (Taschen) offers an extensive eye-candy overview of many of the leading artists; and Right Click Save: The New Digital Art Community (Vetro) gathers important essays and interviews by scholars, curators, and pioneering and emerging artists about the global, fiscal, and cultural implications of NFTs. The cultural history, however, is yet to be told.

Editor’s Note, 6/17/2024: A previous version of this review inaccurately implied that the Berlin backstory of Mothership had already been widely reported. In addition, the review initially identified Small’s description of a dinner with “large burrata salads, wine, and mojitos” ending in “a taxicab headed back uptown” as taking place at an after-party for Erick Calderon’s opening at Venus Over Manhattan. It was for a Quantum Art dinner with artist Justin Aversano. Additional minor changes have been made to this review for clarity and precision. ARTnews regrets the confusion. 

Last February, Hermès won a lawsuit against Mason Rothschild (aka Sonny Estival) concerning Rothschild’s NFT collection “MetaBirkins,” 3D renderings of the company’s iconic Birkin bag covered in fur in a variety of patterns.

A jury ruled that Rothschild’s NFTs failed a test that would allow them to be considered art. The luxury handbag company was set to be awarded $133,000 in damages. Hermès also sought a permanent injunction against Rothschild, which was granted in June.

Documents filed on March 13 detail how Rothschild inquired about whether the injunction would prohibit him from providing permission to the Spritmuseum to display the MetaBirkins. The works were to appear on a screen in an Andy Warhol exhibition and his practice of Business Art.

According to Rothschild, the contemporary art and spirits museum had contacted him just before Christmas last year about displaying the MetaBirkins on a screen, “just as the images are available on the Internet.”

Judge Jed S. Rakoff ruled that based on evidence, “the Court cannot conclude” that the MetaBirkins would steer clear of the injunction’s terms, as Rothschild did not provide details about what permissions he would be granting Spritmuseum for things like promotion of the show or related merchandise. There were also no contracts or documents outlining the agreement Rothschild had with the museum or the scope of permissions granted to the institution in Stockholm.

The court documents also state the sworn testimony by Spritmuseum curator Mia Sundberg and Blake Gopnik, a New York–based critic enlisted to organize the Warhol show, only raised more concerns about Rothschild’s request.

Sundberg said the museum had not yet decided whether it would discuss the Hermès lawsuit in the text of the exhibition. While the text would be written “in an open-ended way,” she said, “I would not be telling my public that this is an artist who is a fraud. That would not be a way of expressing myself in a text in an exhibition.”

Gopnik was retained by Rothschild as an expert witness during the trial, but the court excluded his testimony, “finding it did not remotely comply with the requirement of Federal Rule of Evidence.” Shortly after the ruling last February, Gopnik also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post op-ed titled “A misguided jury failed to see the art in Mason Rothschild’s MetaBirkins“.

The judge singled out two lines from Gopnik’s op-ed that indicated he was “openly hostile” to the jury’s verdict last year: “I couldn’t see any real difference between Rothschild and the many artists, good and bad, who made art about our culture’s commerce, often by including trademarked goods” and “I was wrong about that jury but hope an appeals court will realize that the jury was wrong about Rothschild’s art.”

As a result of their testimony, the judge expressed “deep concerns” that allowing Rothschild to provide permission to the Spritmuseum would “likely to lead the public to believe that ‘MetaBirkins’ NFTs or related merchandise are in [some] manner associated or connected with Hermes and/or its ‘Birkin’ trademark and/or trade dress.”

The Spritmuseum and Sundberg did not respond to press inquiries by ARTnews.

News of the judge’s decision was first reported by Bloomberg Law.

Devin Alan Rhoden has been accused of being involved in a “rug pull” scheme, in which investors are lured in with the promise of digital assets, only for the project to be pulled and the duper to abscond with the project funds. In the criminal complaint, Rhoden is accused of promoting  UndeadApes NFTs (from the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT suite) using the username Deviinz to an Air Force veteran on the gaming platform Discord, falsely inflating the value of the NFTs, which led interested parties to believe the project was a collaboration with a sought-after NFT collective known as Stoned Ape Crew. 

Stoned Ape Crew, however, denied any such collaboration, causing the purported value of UndeadApes NFTs to nosedive. The victim, whose identity was not disclosed, said his digital assets were consequently made “worthless”.

The filing alleges that Rhoden withdrew $80,000 from his Coinbase account in April 2022, a majority of which was allegedly amassed from criminal activity. Shortly after, Rhoden and his wife purchased a $300,000 residence in Florida; the bank statements from the purchase were submitted as evidence of fraud. As Rhoden’s Coinbase account was connected to his driver’s license, investigators had authority to search his Google profile, which recorded several damning searches, including “does logs show on discord if they delete their account,” “what happens if a utility nfts rugs” and “wire fraud court martial”. Discord logs also allegedly show Rhoden bragging about the funds received from the victims. 

In an interview between Rhoden and two members of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Rhoden admitted to “marketing his services to NFT developers” via Discord but denied any knowledge of fraud.  He is currently out on a $20,000 bond and awaiting a court date.

TEMPLE ATOP CONTENTIONS. Today India’s PM Narendra Modi inaugurated a controversial Hindu temple to Ram, a Hindu deity, in the city of Ayodhya, replacing a three-domed, 16^th-century mosque torn down by mobs in 1992. The incident ignited riots at the time, leading to the death of some 2,000 people. The inauguration is seen as political calculation on the part of Modi, to informally launch his campaign for this spring’s general election. Some opposition leaders boycotted the proceedings, while individual Muslims residing in the city, who are part of India’s largest minority, told the BBC they feared for their safety. About 80 percent of India’s population is Hindu.

SCHIELES FOR SALE. Two Egon Schiele works restituted to the family of Austrian Holocaust victim, Fritz Grünbaum, will go to auction. The paintings on paper were returned to Grünbaum’s legal heirs on January 19, in a restitution ceremony at the Manhattan DA’s office, and have been consigned to Christie’s auction house. Portrait of a Man (1917) and Girl With Black Hair (1911) had been in the collections of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Ohio’s Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, respectively. Grünbaum was a Jewish cabaret performer, murdered in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941 after his art collection was seized by Nazi officials.

The Digest

A US Air Force cyber analyst named Devin Alan Rhoden was arrested for allegedly plotting to hype the value of NFTs. He is accused of implementing the so-called “rug-pull” scheme, or falsely promoting NFTs to investors, before quickly putting an end to the whole endeavor, or “killing the project,” after having cashed in some $80,000 believed to be linked to their investments. [The Art Newspaper]

The role of dealer Yves Bouvier is dissected in the ongoing Accent Delight International v. Sotheby’s trial, despite him not being included in the proceedings. ARTnews Senior Reporter Daniel Cassady sheds light on how opaque art deals can lead to the astronomical prices, and the current lawsuit, brought by Russian billionaire Dimitry Ryboloviev. Meanwhile, Rybolovlev, who nevertheless made hefty profits by reselling at least some of the contentious artwork acquired through his relationship with Bouvier, appears to be looking to sell his stake in the AS Monaco Football Club. [ARTnews and Bloomberg]

At the annual FOG art fair in San Francisco, dealers blame the art market at large for dips in sales, not the tech milieu, undergoing a recent economic squeeze. [Cultured Mag]

The Orlando museum has narrowed its focus in their Basquiat lawsuit, to focus on its former director Aaron De Groft, due to financial troubles. [ARTnews]

The Jack Shainman Gallery opens in the historic NYC clock tower, a stunning Italian Renaissance Revival building in Civic Center, south of Tribeca. [Hyperallergic]

Launched under previous management in January 2022, Twitter Blue subscribers were allowed to set NFTs minted on Ethereum as profile pictures. Users could click the profile picture for more details on the collection of the NFT, the contract address, TokenID, and the app on which the NFT was minted.

All descriptions on the NFT profile pictures have been removed from X’s support page, TechCrunch reported. Those with an NFT profile picture still have hexagonal avatars. It remains unclear whether or not those will be removed.

Allowing users to create a brand or collecting experience—what was once considered the future of NFTs—has been slowly falling out of favor online. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, for example, shut down support for NFTs in March last year.

It remains unclear what will be the fate of NFTs. Though the market has recovered with trade volumes above $1.6 billion over the last few months, the value of some high-priced tokens like Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) have rapidly decreased since its peak.

The case hinged on a simple but glaring omission from the contract between Casale and DigiART: there was no start date.

According to the suit, DigiART claims Casale gave the company exclusive rights to market and sell any NFTs the artist made between May 2021 and May 2, 2022. In exchange for DigiART’s marketing prowess, Casale would split the net profits of his NFTs evenly with the company. Secondary-market royalties would go straight in Casale’s pocket.

In the judgement, Judge Wendy Berger outlined a blow-by-blow account the events that led to the lawsuit and the reason for her decision. Marcel Katz, who since January 2021 had worked as Casale’s “east coast representative” for his physical artworks via his company Art Plug, asked Casale if the artist would like to form a second partnership, one strictly based on the sale of NFTs called DigiART. Casale agreed to that proposal.

After the two had come to terms about splitting profits and secondary sales, a DigiART representative emailed Casale a draft agreement. While there were details in the body of the email regarding the profit-sharing structure, it had no start date. Casale signed the agreement on April 30, 2021, with the start date still blank. 

A few days later, Katz shared the contract, now with the effective start date filled in as May 2, 2021, while Casale waited 10 months for his countersigned copy of the agreement.

In March 2021, three months before the agreement with DigiART, Casale launched the NFT project that would become Coolman’s Universe (after Casale’s Instagram handle, Coolman Coffeedan). According to the complaint filed by DigiART, Katz, under the Casale/DigiART agreement, worked to promote Casale and his work, most prominently with a pop-up in Miami’s design district during Miami Art Week that sold “the world’s most expensive cup of coffee, at $1,000 per paper cup, with each cup featuring a one-of-a-kind original artwork by Casale.”

Coolman’s Universe was comprised of 10,000 NFTs worth more than ETH 18,000 ($50 million) on online trading platform OpenSea. Regardless of the project’s start date, DigitART’s complaint alleged that the project meant Casale  was “in breach of his obligations” to the company and ignoring his “contractual obligations” because the sales took place after the agreement had been signed.

Casale said that neither Katz nor DigiART let him know that he’d breached their agreement, despite knowledge of Coolman’s Universe, and according to the ruling, “DigiART admits that it did not inform [Casale] that his release would be a violation of any agreement until months after it became aware of the Coolman NFT Project.”

In the end, DigiART’s claims that “Casale fraudulently induced DigiART to expend its time, money, and energy building his brand [and] promoting his work” and that Casale has profited “to the tune of millions of dollars, which he has refused to share with DigiART [as stipulated by their agreement” didn’t matter. 

Berger’s decision to in favor of Casale’s motion for summary judgment and dismiss the case against him was summed up neatly in her ruling: “As a general rule, presence of blanks in a contract is fatal to the enforcement.”

Neither DigiART nor their attorneys responded to a request for comment.

“Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value.

What’s more, supply vastly outstripped demand for NFTs. Just 21 percent of the collections included in the study can claim full ownership, meaning around four out of every five collections remains unsold. With buyers becoming more discerning, the report notes, “projects that lack clear use cases, compelling narratives, or genuine artistic value are finding it increasingly difficult to attract attention and sales.”

And, while headlines during the heyday of NFT speculation focused on individual pieces that sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars in crypto, almost none are so exorbitantly priced today. Less than one percent are listed at more than $6,000, and the bulk of the most expensive collections are priced between $5 and $100. Almost a fifth of the “top” collections have a floor price of zero. Even among the more expensive NFTs, the report notes, such prices may be set “without any bearing on tangible, real demand,” reflecting wishful thinking from sellers and potentially distorting investors’ view of an NFT’s meager inherent value.

The dappGambl researchers conclude that while we may never see an NFT boom like the one in 2021-2022, the assets may evolve in a way to survive the wipeout. For example, they could be given a specific function, becoming a pass for special event access or a virtual item to be purchased and traded in video games.

This, however, would not address perhaps the greatest drawback of NFTs, which became a major controversy as they peaked in popularity: their environmental impact. Non-fungible tokens are minted on the blockchain, a process that requires energy, and bought and sold in marketplaces that run on cryptocurrencies “mined” with computer rigs that have a significant carbon footprint. But minting tokens alone carries a cost. The “Dead NFTs” report observes that the nearly 200,000 NFT collections “with no apparent owners or market share” identified by the study caused carbon emissions equivalent to the annual output from 2,048 houses, or 3,531 cars.

Of course, enthusiasts didn’t worry too much about that when NFTs were a hot commodity. And if they ever make a modest comeback, climate concerns will likely be brushed aside again. Can’t let something like that get in the way of the next hype cycle.

In addition to serving prison time, Nathaniel Chastain, who previously served as a product manager for OpenSea, now must also pay a fine of $50,000 and give up 15.98 ETH, or roughly $26,500.

Chastain had already been charged with one count of money laundering and one count of wire fraud. He had been accused of purchasing NFTs with the knowledge that they would soon be featured on OpenSea’s homepage. He was convicted on both counts.

The charges had each come with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and according to Reuters, prosecutors had been asking for a greater amount of time behind bars than what Chastain ultimately received.

“I let down the company I was serving and lost sight of the person I aspired to be,” Chastain said during his sentencing.

His case had been closely watched because federal investigators said it was the first of its kind. Never before, authorities said, had there been a case revolving around insider trading, cryptocurrency, and NFTs.

Reuters reported that the judge overseeing the case, US District Judge Jesse Furman, had expressed skepticism over whether an insider trading case revolving around $50,000 worth of assets would have been brought to court were it not for the fact that that the deal occurred in the “slightly sexy” crypto world.

Yet authorities seized on the opportunity as a means to ward off any other future instances of insider trading. US Attorney Damian Williams said that Chastain’s case “should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading—in any marketplace—will not be tolerated.”

Chastain’s sentencing comes amid widespread talk that the NFT bubble begun in 2021 has burst. Trading volume has declined significantly, and multiple lawsuits have targeted how certain NFTs are bought and sold.

The painting, which was controversially attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, broke auction records when it sold in 2017 for $450.3 million at Christie’s New York. The portrait shows Christ holding a crystal orb.

The digital asset platform ElmonX will mint the NFT in collaboration with the image licensing company Bridgeman Images. Terms of the sale are expected to be announced on August 12.

“[As] the world’s leading specialists in licensing fine art, cultural, and historical media for reproduction, [we] are delighted to collaborate with ElmonX, experts at the forefront of NFT art creation,” Bridgeman Images said in a statement. The partnership offers a “unique and exclusive opportunity to create high-quality NFTs based on Bridgeman Images’ vast collection.”

Bridgeman collaborated earlier with ElmonX to mint such NFTs as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1904), and Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907).

According to the ElmonX website, there were 330 editions of the Mona Lisa NFT sold at £150 ($191). Additionally, 10 editions of a bundled NFT and print version of the Mona Lisa were sold for £900 ($1,144). One of them was resold on the NFT marketplace OpenSea for 3.7 ETH ($6,764) just last week.

This project comes as the NFT market sees a downturn in sales that’s increasing tension between traders and creators.