The 258-year-old auction house is winding down its standalone digital art department, laying off staff.
Christie’s, the 258-year-old British auction house best known for selling masterpieces like da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, has been one of the most high-profile traditional institutions to embrace digital art.
Its $69.3 million sale of Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days in 2021 became a watershed moment that propelled nonfungible tokens (NFTs) into the mainstream.
Christie’s was founded in 1766 in London by James Christie, a Scottish auctioneer who quickly made a name for himself as one of the leading figures in the art world.
The auction house gained popularity by handling sales of fine art, antiques, and luxury goods, establishing itself as a marketplace for collectors and aristocrats. Over more than 250 years, it has grown into one of the world’s most renowned auction houses.
However, the firm is pulling back. Christie’s has shut down its standalone non-fungible token (NFT) department and reportedly laid off staff.
A spokesperson described the move as a “strategic decision,” even as the auction house pledged to keep offering NFTs at future auctions. Two employees, including its vice president of digital art, were let go, though at least one digital specialist will remain.
Christie’s NFT experiment
The auction house leaned heavily into Web3 after Beeple’s blockbuster sale. It launched a dedicated NFT platform in September 2022 and even created a crypto-only real estate team the following year.
In 2021, art NFTs peaked with $2.9 billion in trading volume, but by the first quarter of 2025 that number had collapsed 93% to just $23.8 million, according to DappRadar’s report. Active traders also plunged from over half a million in 2022 to fewer than 20,000 this year, showing how the hype has faded.
The NFT market has shrunk dramatically in marketcap as well, falling from about $16 billion in April 2022 to just $6 billion by September 2025, data from CoinGecko shows.
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Why it matters
Advisers say the cutback reflects simple economics.
Digital art adviser Fanny Lakoubay said:
“This decision is probably tied to the current art market contraction (see the myriad of articles about this on artnet news). Auction houses can’t justify a whole department when it brings in less revenue than the others (even with some recent successful sales). It sucks that the staff were laid off, and hopefully Christie’s will still integrate digital art into contemporary sales. It’s definitely not a great public signal, but we should also remember: auction houses only focus on secondary sales of already well-known artists and brands.”
Former Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith weighed in on Christie’s move to fold its NFT unit, saying it shouldn’t be read as the death of digital art. ”
What’s happening is the same pattern we’ve seen whenever a new medium collides with old institutions. Photography, video, even Impressionism all went through the same arc of being dismissed, overhyped, segregated, and finally absorbed,” Smith wrote on X. He argued that the NFT boom of 2021 was “liquidity froth,” not a cultural settlement, and that auction houses struggled to justify charging 25% commissions for works that didn’t require vaults, shipping, or insurance.
According to Smith, this isn’t an obituary but a “graduation moment” for NFTs. “Digital art doesn’t need its own department any more than photography does today. It belongs in the same conversation as contemporary painting and sculpture,” he wrote, adding that the shift signals a future where provenance and authenticity will be defined on-chain. “We are building the cultural memory of the digital age. The works that matter will be the ones that stand up not just as speculation, but as art.”
