Christie’s Closes NFT Department As Global Art Market Slows
UK auction giant Christie’s is closing its NFT (non-fungible token) department and making it part of a broader category amid a global decline in the digital art market.
That’s according to a Now Media report that cited a person familiar with the matter.
“Christie’s has made a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales,” the person said. “The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th and 21st Century Art category.”
Two members of the department’s staff, including Christie’s VP of Digital Art Nicole Sales Giles, have been let go, the story said, adding that at least one digital art specialist will remain.
This move is part of a broader wave of changes under the auction house’s new CEO Bonnie Brennan, who joined in February.
Christie’s Helped Fuel The NFT Bull Market
Christie’s has played a major role in the NFT space, and helped ignite the market’s 2021 bull run when it sold multiple, now high-profile artworks.
These include Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann’s Everdays: The First 5000 Days artwork, which closed at auction in March 2021 with a winning bid of $69.3 million.
In September 2022, the auction house also launched its own on-chain platform called Christie’s 3.0. It then went on to unveil a crypto-only real estate team in July this year.
Christie’s has also been at the forefront of digital art exhibitions over the years.
NFT Market Records Mixed Results
Since the height of the 2021 bull market, the NFT space has had a turbulent few years. 2024 was the market’s worst year in terms of trading volume and sales prices since 2020.
This year, the market has started to show some signs of life, with the market soaring to a peaks capitalization of over $9.3 billion, 40% up from where the sector’s valuation stood in July.
NFT market cap (Source: CoinGecko)
But it’s fallen since, and stands at around $6 billion as of 4:43 a.m. EST, according to data from CoinGecko.
While the market seems to have recovered slightly in 2025, digital art adviser Fanny Lakoubay said that auction houses like Christie’s can no longer justify a whole NFT department.
She said that auction houses “only focus on secondary sales of already well-known artists and brands,” and argued that it’s “still too early for that model to really work/scale with digital art.”
However, an NFT collector and member of the Doomed decentralized autonomous organization, who posted under the X handle “Benji,” said that Christie’s recent move was forced by a “flawed and unsustainable” business model rather than low demand for NFTs.
“How can you charge 25-30% commission on something that does not need to be authenticated/stored/ insured/shipped, when your online competitors like Gondi charge zero commission for the exact same sale?” the collector wrote.
Benji said that Christie’s exit from the NFT space is also a “net positive,” because it means there’s “one less value extractor” in the market, which will inevitably benefit collectors and artists.
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