This goose, which is not even real, has been auctioned for millions
A goose, that isn’t even real, was sold for $6.2 million during an auction in New York City. ‘The Goose’, a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), belonged to a bankrupt crypto hedge fund named Three Arrows Capital.
Sotheby’s originally predicted that ‘The Goose’ would sell for $2 million to $3 million.
The price is more than twice what the premier auction house Sotheby had forecast. It is also the second-highest sale ever made for a piece of generative art, according to a Southeby comment cited by The Washington Post. 
The Goose, by Dmitri Cherniak | Sotheby’s
In recent years, Sotheby has reportedly started serving a new set of clientele consisting of young, high-rolling crypto millionaires.
“Sixty per cent of the buyers that night were under 40 years old,” Michael Bouhanna, head of Digital Art and NFTs at Sotheby’s was quoted as saying by The Washington Post. “This is a group that is new to the art world but certainly a part of Sotheby’s future,” Bouhanna added.
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Sotheby has sold $150 million worth of NFTs to date, according to the spokesperson Derek Parsons. This includes two auctions for NFTs seized from bankrupt Two Arrows. A May 19 event fetched $2.4 million while a June 15 auction generated a total of $11 million in NFT sales, including ‘The Goose’.
The cluck of the unreal ‘The Goose’
‘The Goose’ developed a cult following right when it was created in October 2021.
It is seen as the seminal edition of “Ringers”, a collection of 1,000 NFTs created by digital artist Dmitri Cherniak, each unique and generated by coding.
For the anonymous buyer of ‘The Goose’, “NFTs are a critical part of the architecture for freedom in an increasingly centralised and corporate-run digital world.”
Why is ‘The Goose’ valuable?
This is because it is deemed to be a representative of a coded moment of randomness with a meaning.
“One reason ‘The Goose’ is so valuable is because it shows off the beauty of randomness,” Nikolai Yakovenko, the founder of DeepNFTValue, a machine learning start-up that estimates the value of high-priced NFTs, was quoted as saying by The Washington Post.
The present buyer of ‘The Goose’ reportedly intends to keep it in his NFT museum, and hold on to it as an investment for at least 10 years.