Noah Davis, the head of digital sales at Christie’s who helped initiate the NFT boom in the art world, will leaving the auction house to work on CryptoPunks, a hugely popular NFT collection.
CryptoPunks was recently bought by YugaLabs, the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, and is valued at more than $2 billion.
“I’m humbled and honored to announce I’ll be leaving my current post in July to steward the CryptoPunks as Brand Lead under the umbrella of @yugalabs,” Davis wrote in the Twitter post announcing his departure from Christie’s.
As head of digital sales, Davis helped orchestrate the historic $69.3 million sale of Beeple’s Everydays, the First 5,000 Days (2021) that nearly singlehandedly helped create the rabid NFT market of 2021. Having first begun at Christie’s in 2014, Davis has recently become a major influencer in the NFT space, building a large following and creating his own NFT project called HOWLERZ.
“Noah has been a dedicated colleague and senior member of the Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art specialist department and has played a valuable role in establishing our leadership in the NFT and digital art space,” Christie’s said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with Noah in his new role.”
In his Twitter thread announcing his new job, Davis outlined his plans for CryptoPunks.
“I WILL NOT FUCK WITH THE PUNKS…” he wrote. “What does that mean? It means no Punks on lunchboxes or cringe TV shows/shitty movies. It means no arbitrary rushed utility or thoughtless airdrops. It means if you love your Punk(s) because they are what they are (just Punks) then you and I see eye to eye…”
Davis continued to say that the community would be a major factor in deciding how to bring the collection into its future.
He will finish his tenure with a final NFT sale at Christie’s this month that will see NFTs auctioned off to benefit the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
