Billie Eilish's digital portrait made entirely of emoticons up for auction as NFT

A non-fungible token (NFT) based art portrait of American singer Billie Eilish has been put for an online auction. The one of its kind digital artwork has been made using a wide range of complete and broken emoticons. The artist Yung Jake, who shared the artwork on Twitter using his personal handle @yungjake, revealed that the auction was live on till midnight March 22. 

According to the New York Times, Jake started creating his digital masterpiece back in 2015. His highly detailed and realistic art is completely made of full, broken or duplicated emojis which have been used to create the curves, depths, and facial features of the Grammy-winning musician.  The auction is live at foundation.app. As per the website, the current highest bid is placed at $14,276.00 by a user named  @artoninternet. In case they withdraw, the second-highest bid is placed at $10,707.00 by a user named @3FMusic. 

Earlier this month, an digital artwork in the form of NFT has been sold for nearly $70 million in British Auction House Christie’s first-ever sale of an artwork that does not even exist physically. The artwork named ‘Everydays -The First 5000 Days’ is a digital work by American artist Mike Winkelmann, popularly known as Beeple. The multi-colour artwork which was sold for $69,346,250 is a collage of 5,000 discreet images, created over a time span of over 13 years. 

What is NFT? 

NFT is a cryptographic token that acts as a non-duplicable digital certificate of ownership for any digital asset. Any item online could be secured by an NFT. For this purpose, the item has to be put in place using an open-source code. Once the code is put in place, it is minted or published permanently using a token.  The NFT artwork movement has been steadily growing and has seen buyers, who are connected to artists via online marketplaces such as Nifty Gateway, Larva Labs and Open Sea, snatching up digital artworks at increasingly high prices

(Image Credits: yungjake/Twitter)