From art exhibitions getting cancelled, sales slowing down to commissions drying up. It all happened with Cam Rackam during Covid-19 lockdown. The California artist from Huntington Beach saw his entire money-making enterprise suffer since the pandemic struck.
That's when he pivoted to the digital art world through NFTs. And all it took was 32 minutes to change his life!
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Until 2021, the maximum money Cam Rackam had made by selling a piece of his own art was $11,000, which was for a painting and sculpture piece that he had sold in 2015, as per CNBC. But that quickly changed after Rackam started creating digital art as Non Fungible tokens (NFTs) last year.
The NFT artist had reportedly told CNBC that he had seen the success of popular NFT art collections, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Beeple's $69 million NFT project, and decided it could be a fun and lucrative space for him to explore.
Rackam¡¯s NFT launch through digital art sales began when he reached out to a popular meme page on Instagram called 'wallstmemes' and asked if they wanted to collaborate on an NFT collection. They agreed and Rackam created thousands of iterations of a Wall Street-themed cartoon bull, as per CNBC.
With Rackam designing the art and the meme page boosting sales by spreading the word on digital channels, the duo managed to sell the entire collection of 10,000 NFTs in 32 minutes after the launch on October 27, 2021.
Rackam said to CNBC "In the first five minutes, about 2,250 of them were gone. But then I realized by minute eight or nine, we were more than halfway done. I started thinking, Oh my god, we're going to sell this thing out super hard.¡±
The collection was reportedly worth 660 Ethereum, which equalled $2.6 million at the time it sold.? Rackam's earning on October 27th 2021 through NFT sales was reportedly $738,593.97.
42-year-old Rackam said he celebrated by drinking champagne and blaring music in his Huntington Beach home.
He further said "I kind of freaked out, I started screaming. I was calling people, hollering into the phone. I lit a cigar in the house and opened a bottle of champagne."
"The neighbours probably thought it was some kind of rager, but it was just one artist transitioning to a new medium," he said to CNBC.
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