The Evening Standard’s one-off digital art tribute to the new King was a record-breaking success over the Coronation weekend.
We teamed up with painter Trevor Jones on the free NFT which showed St Edward’s Crown — a solid gold piece of history studded with hundreds of precious stones that has been used to crown our kings and queens since 1661 – moving into an animation.
Jones is one of the country’s leading figures in the booming NFT world where his works have sold for millions of US dollars but he created this piece — called The Oath — for our readers to get for free and they did in their thousands.
The offer – in association with Apollo Entertainment – ended on midnight on Sunday and by then around 20,200 NFTs had been minted which is a record for this type of open edition work on the Nifty Gateway platform where it was accessed.
Jones said: “The public’s response to The Oath - the artwork I created in collaboration with the Evening Standard and Apollo Entertainment - has been phenomenal, with 20,200 NFTs minted over the allocated 4 days, by unique accounts. That means 20,200 people now own the NFT - an unprecedented result!
“The project not only marked a historic moment but also definitely succeeded in engaging a much wider audience with NFT art. We couldn’t have hoped for a better result.”
The work also gathered attention around the globe with TV coverage as far afield as Brazil and Colombia and was also seen by more than 2,500 visitors at the W1 Curates art space on Oxford Street over three days.
An NFT, which stands for non-fungible token, is a unique digital trading asset representing real-world objects, such as works of art, that are bought and sold online.
Aishah Roberts, creative producer at Pyramid Four, said: “We live in a society that is fast-changing and increasingly reliant on digital assets. Trevor Jones "The Oath" is an iconic moment in digital art history, while highlighting how artists bridge the digital divide and reimagine how to monetize their work through non-fungible tokens (aka NFTs).”
