# The most expensive NFTs ever sold > The record is $91.8 million, for a Pak piece called The Merge, though nearly 29,000 people bought it between them. Below that sit Beeple’s $69.3 million Everydays and a run of CryptoPunks. Every one of these headlines carries a caveat, and most of the caveats went unreported. Source: https://thenftacademy.com/learn/most-expensive-nfts Last updated: 2026-09-12 Site: The NFT Academy (https://thenftacademy.com) --- Lists of record NFT sales are easy to find and mostly useless, because they report the headline and stop. The headline is the least interesting part. What makes these sales worth understanding is the structure behind them, which in several cases is nothing like what the number implies. ### The record sales | Rank | Piece | Price | When | The part usually left out | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | **The Merge** — Pak | $91.8M | Late 2021 | Not one buyer. 28,983 collectors bought 312,686 units; $91.8M is the total raised. | | 2 | **Everydays: The First 5000 Days** — Beeple | $69.3M | Mar 2021 | The genuine single-buyer record. Christie’s first NFT auction, and the sale that started everything. | | 3 | **Clock** — Pak & Julian Assange | $52.7M | Feb 2022 | Bought by a DAO of 10,000+ people to fund Assange’s legal defence. Again, not an individual. | | 4 | **HUMAN ONE** — Beeple | $28.9M | Nov 2021 | Half physical: a four-screen kinetic sculpture. Beeple can still update what it displays. | | 5 | **CryptoPunk #5822** | $23.7M | Feb 2022 | 8,000 ETH, paid by Deepak Thapliyal of Chain.com. One of nine alien Punks. Guinness-recognised. | | 6 | **CryptoPunk #7523** "Covid Alien" | $11.75M | Jun 2021 | Sold at Sotheby’s — an alien Punk wearing a mask, auctioned mid-pandemic. | | 7 | **TPunk #3442** | $10.5M | Aug 2021 | On Tron, not Ethereum. Bought by Tron’s own founder, which tells you something. | | 8 | **CryptoPunk #4156** | $10.26M | Dec 2021 | 2,500 ETH. The seller had previously been a vocal CryptoPunks advocate. | ### Why the top of this list is misleading Three of the top four weren’t one person buying one thing. **The Merge** was a fractionalised sale. Pak sold "mass" units that merged into single tokens in each buyer’s wallet. Reporting it as the most expensive NFT is a bit like reporting a company’s IPO as the most expensive share purchase. It’s the largest amount of money raised by one artwork, which is a real and impressive fact, but a different fact. **Clock** was bought by AssangeDAO — thousands of people pooling funds for a political cause. The price reflects a fundraising campaign, not an assessment of artistic value. If you want the honest answer to "what’s the most expensive NFT one person has ever bought", it’s **Everydays** at $69.3 million, and that sale deserves its reputation. Christie’s had never auctioned an NFT. Beeple had spent over thirteen years making one image a day without missing one. The work was real and the effort was verifiable, which is more than most of what followed could claim. ### What happened to them afterwards This is the part the listicles skip. Aggregate NFT market value fell from around $9 billion to roughly $2.4 billion, about 95% below the 2021 peak. The blue-chip collections that produced these records — CryptoPunks above all — trade far below where they were. Deepak Thapliyal’s $23.7 million Punk has never been resold at anything approaching that figure, and a great many peak-era buyers are holding pieces with no realistic exit. A few observations that generalise: - **A record price is one transaction, not a valuation.** It tells you what the most motivated buyer in the world paid on one day, which is the least representative data point available. - **Several record sales involved related parties.** TPunk #3442 was bought by the founder of the chain it lived on. This pattern was common enough that any list of "highest sales" should be read with [wash trading](/learn/nft-scams-and-red-flags) in mind — moving an asset between wallets you control produces a real-looking sale at any price you choose. - **The art held up better than the collectibles.** Beeple and Pak are working artists with careers that predate and outlast the boom. Profile-picture collections bought purely for resale had nothing underneath the price. ### Does any of this matter now? For deciding what to buy, no. These prices belong to a set of conditions that aren’t reassembling, and treating them as a benchmark is how people talked themselves into the losses of 2022. For understanding what happened, yes, quite a lot. The sales above are the clearest available record of a market pricing scarcity it had invented, in a currency that had itself just multiplied, for buyers who in several cases created the scarcity they were bidding on. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s the mechanism, and knowing it is most of what protects you from the next version. If you want the collections these came from explained properly, see [the famous NFT collections](/learn/famous-nft-collections). If you’re weighing up whether any of this is still alive, [the 2026 numbers](/learn/are-nfts-dead) answer it more directly than a price list can. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the most expensive NFT ever sold? The Merge by Pak, at $91.8 million on Nifty Gateway in late 2021. It carries an asterisk: it wasn’t sold to one buyer. Nearly 29,000 collectors bought 312,686 units between them, and the $91.8 million is the total raised. For a single NFT sold to a single buyer, the record is Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days at $69.3 million. ### What is the most expensive CryptoPunk? CryptoPunk #5822, which sold for 8,000 ETH, about $23.7 million, in February 2022 to Deepak Thapliyal of Chain.com. It’s one of only nine alien Punks in the collection of 10,000, and Guinness World Records recognised it as the most expensive CryptoPunk sale. ### Are these NFTs still worth that much? Almost none of them. Aggregate NFT market value fell from roughly $9 billion to about $2.4 billion, and the blue-chip collections these records came from trade at a fraction of peak. A record sale price is a historical fact about one transaction, not a current valuation. ### Why did people pay so much for NFTs? Three things at once in 2021: near-zero interest rates pushing money toward risk, lockdown attention, and genuine novelty. Add the fact that several buyers were paying in crypto that had itself appreciated enormously, so the dollar figures felt less real to the people spending them.