Tech

People Have Spent More than $1 Million on NFT ‘Girlfriends’

For the low price of $25,000, you can have a Bull Market Girlfriend of your very own.
A screenshot of the Bull Market Girlfriends virtual gallery
Image Source: Bull Market Girlfriends

Good news: You can now buy a girlfriend on the blockchain.

Bull Market Girlfriends, a recently-launched NFT collection, come in a wide variety of genres—you can buy a Beauty Queen Girlfriend, a Devilish Girlfriend, a Good Girl Girlfriend, or even an Alien Girlfriend. Initially these portraits were based on real women, though as the project expanded artist Kristina K. (who goes by Kris K. online) and her husband, Martin Lavoie, told Motherboard that the girlfriends became amalgamations of different people. 

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In some cases, like a collaboration with Lindsay Lohan, the girlfriends are still indeed based on real people. Kris and Martin say that in those cases they share the revenue with the model and do not sell the licensing rights to the image.

Although a project where you buy and sell women who are explicitly framed as romantic partners feels like it's a product straight out of the grossest aspects of crypto culture, Kris and Martin say that Bull Market Girlfriends has its roots in the long held artistic tradition of drawing portraits of women.

"The project is led, designed, and executed by a woman. Beautiful women have always been the subject of art since cave drawings," Kris and Martin told Motherboard. "They are inspiring. This is not meant to be diminutive, but empowering."

Kris told Motherboard that the rise of NFTs over the past year, which saw collections of JPEGs with ownership receipts posted to the blockchain become multimillion-dollar ventures, is what made her launch her career as an artist at long last.

"She always got requests from people to purchase her art, but we were too busy to get invested in this," Kris and her partner Martin Lavoie told Motherboard. "It was very clear at the beginning of August that there was probably no other time in humanity's history that so many people were taking interest in visual arts. We worked on structuring the collection and launched it in August. To our surprise, the initial mint sold out in 56 minutes."

According to Kris and Martin, despite not having any strong ties to the NFT community, Bull Market Girlfriends has grown exponentially with each new drop. Of the available works on OpenSea, the least expensive Girlfriend, #14, is available for the low price of 6.5 ETH, or around $25,000. The works are also available in a daily raffle on the Bull Market Girlfriends Discord channel for a discounted price. 

As it turns out, the idea of a blockchain-linked “girlfriend” has legs. To date, the collection has done $1,424,000 in trade volume on NFT marketplace OpenSea. 

Kris and Martin told Motherboard they believe that this growth was only possible because of NFTs and the community surrounding them, which they say removes a lot of the "friction" in the traditional art market.

"The project could have been done in a traditional format but it would probably have taken decades to build a similar audience," they said. "Today we have 20,000 people on twitter, 19, 000 in discord and thousands subscribed to the newsletter and SMS notifications. We're only two months into the project. This system allows us to interact a lot more with people interested in the art.