The auction format for art has been a cornerstone of the market for centuries, with major houses like Christie's (founded 1766) and Sotheby's (1744) establishing formats that remain influential today.
To me, it is one of the most exciting ways of selling and collecting work, especially in the hyper-financial environment of NFTs and digital art. With us seeing a record sale at auction for a piece by an artist in the scene, I thought it would be a good idea to go into the history of the OG Drifella card, as well as the allure of auctions. ↓🧵
The English auction dominates traditional art sales: the ascending bid format most people picture, where bidders openly compete with increasingly higher bids until only one remains.
This format works particularly well for unique artworks because it allows price discovery through competitive bidding and, when in person, creates a public performance that enhances an artwork's prestige.
There’s something very exciting, albeit obscene, about watching a singular work run up by the millions over the space of a few minutes. One of the best examples of this is the classic art auction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’, which went for a record breaking $450 million.
Although we are yet to see any crypto auction site add virtual auctioneers (if anyone does this now, I want a cut), it is still an exciting thing to watch unfold on site.
The current choice by most of my peers for auctioning works is Exchange, and we recently witnessed one of the highest single sales for a work in the scene take place there: Evil Biscuit’s (@bis__cut) ‘drifella card 1’.
The battle happened between just two collectors after the $7k mark was hit, with it running up to a whopping $12,300.
Hype, the winning bidder, told me that ‘it felt like a piece that represents some physical form of "origin" of the project that is rather special. And it was quite unique because he has many drawings, and had the physical card NFTs at the Yeche Lange Gallery, but a physical printed card stands out. I also like collecting earlier stuff because there's no "inflation" on it. There won't be a collection of 1,333 physical biscuit cards from years ago haha.’
The card is notable for being one of two ‘first iterations’ of physical Drifella pieces, with both of these being made in march of 2023, supposedly a few days after the launch of Drifella on ETH.
For Biscuit, cards are an extremely important part of his practice, with him telling me ‘at the time I was memeing that I wanted to make a card game with the NFTs, lol. I collected cards with my brothers and cousins since I was a kid, and at the time was collecting and taking high quality photos of a bunch I had. They were from Naruto CCG, Pokemon and YuGiOh mainly. I love the textures and holographics on them’.
This is evident in many of his projects, most obviously his ‘Card NFT’ – 7,777 remixed cards, flitting between traitmaxxed and sparse (my favourites are the ones where a full colour covers most of the card, like a strange Rothko), rich with details from art history and pop-culture references, common themes throughout Biscuits work.
The printed on card format may appear as familiar for fans of @terrorism______ – the artist that partly influenced this form of working for Biscuit. Many of Terrorism’s cards appear as background traits for Biscuits work, and were obsessively collected by him: ‘I saw his cards. I loved them sm and saved every one i could on my phone but they were rare. I’d maybe only seen a few cause he would delete them from his Instagram, until I started chatting with him and he was showing me a ton of them from his archive.
His work is such a genuine expression and learning the reasons he made them to begin with made them even more special. This one from 2019 is insane. An injection fairy lily with tattooed ink and glittering holo, plus the green sticker that reminded me of yard sales and flea markets where price stickers are stuck on collectibles’.
Cards are so key to his work that it is even where his name derives from: this Biscuit card from the Naruto CCG.
So, what’s the allure with auctions?
My first collection was released as a series of auctions: 3 a day for 21 days, on Exchange.
For me, relatively new to the space, and releasing my first ever collection, I thought auctions made sense mainly as a way of price discovery: I didn’t know what my work should be worth, and so letting the market decide took that stress away from me. It also became a way of letting people pick and choose which mint they wanted to fight for; a way of letting some slip away cheaply to lucky friends in comparison to others; an extremely fun way to spend a week watching bids fly in from people I knew and new collectors I didn’t.
I've described it previously as the most fun I’ve had with selling art, and definitely got me hooked to the space.
That’s the artist side, but what’s the perk for collectors?
There’s a few ways I think about this. Although often done on anonymous wallets, most auction winners in the space come out to talk about their wins openly, and so there is the prestige of competing for highly sought after pieces (especially seen in regard to works by Evil Biscuit, Parker Ito and Tojiba Brand Manager). This helps to drive up prices for artists works, and creates a sort of PVP atmosphere around auctions that fits this space & it’s hyperfinancialised nature. People like to compete, to gamble, to win: auctions push this, but I believe it’s in a positive way.
Hype, winner of the Drifella card auction tells me: ‘I like the auction format, it does have some issues for timezones for people but its convenient for me lol. I don’t know if there's any better way to do it since it eliminates snipers and flippers. They did ramp up quite quickly haha - the auction extension is a little rough because you have no idea how long it'll take. Every new bid adds 3 minutes!’.
To me, it’s a fun, competitive way of selling and collecting pieces – one of the few formats that pulls from the traditional art world that has been co-opted successfully for digital art.
Footer: Thanks always to @exchgART & @bonk_inu Art Masters for helping me to publish this article (as well as giving us a solid platform to auction our works on SOL!).
Links: Leonardo da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi', 2017 World Auction Record: https://youtu.be/3orkmMlSpmI?si=Ud-2K6l8Nmi_d2f5… drifella card 1: https://exchange.art/single/BWM9X8buLSaXzMYmWhP8oxT9DaCgp7Wy3xxDYTskwZSS… Card NFT: https://tensor.trade/trade/card_nft Hype: @varrock Terrorism: @terrorism______
Thread by @archivepilled · 9 tweets · Sunday, October 26, 2025 · Archived via ThreadPilled · Original
