A portion of the proceeds from the auction will be donated to organizations like Planned Parenthood to support women’s reproductive rights.

Sotheby’s has teamed up with digital art collective UnicornDAO to curate a non-fungible token (NFT) auction in honor of International Women’s Day.

The “My Body, My Business” auction, which kicked off Tuesday, features works from 34 traditional artists including Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer and Ellen Von Unwerth. Additionally, the collection will include works from Web3-native artists including Olive Allen, Latashá, Jen Stark and Nadya Tolokonnikova, the collection’s curator and founding member of the activist group Pussy Riot.

Tolokonnikova, who co-founded UnicornDAO last year as a collective to empower women and LGBTQ+ NFT creators, is enthusiastic about utilizing art and activism to help empower women and underrepresented communities.

“Pussy Riot is meant to encourage people to be part of the movement, not just be bystanders who ‘appreciate’ and ‘support’ from the sidelines after the fact,” Tolokonnikova told CoinDesk. “We bring our fight to the streets, we bring our fight to the blockchain, to the galleries and auction houses and museums.”

The auction will be open until March 14. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to organizations like Planned Parenthood that support women’s reproductive health. Crypto donations platform Endaoment is launching PPFA.eth, a wallet address that will help direct further donations to the organization.

“Women have rights on her own body and I support every woman’s decision regarding planning parenthood,” said Abramović in a press release.

For the past two years, Tolokonnikova has been utilizing NFTs for activism and empowering underrepresented communities through her art. In January, she teamed up with fellow artistic activist Shepard Fairey to release a collection called Putin’s Ashes, to raise money for troops in Ukraine. In May 2022, UnicornDAO raised $4.5 million to help bolster its portfolio of NFT projects doing social good.

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The sale was expected to draw up to $30 million before it was abruptly canceled by the seller.

A collection of 104 CryptoPunks expected to be sold for up to $30 million was put on ice Wednesday during a much-anticipated auction at Sotheby’s.

A Sotheby’s representative said that the seller decided to withdraw the lot. The auction was first announced on Feb. 8.

The lot, which Sotheby’s titled “Punk It!,” was first acquired by collector “0x650d” back in July 2021 through a single $7 million transaction.

In a tweet after the initial publication of this article, the pseudonymous collector said they changed their mind:

Perhaps contributing to 0x650d’s reversal were rumors of a tepid reception for the CryptoPunks mega-lot. Three sources, including one bidder on-site at Sotheby’s, told CoinDesk that the highest pre-bid offer was $14 million, which was also the reserve price.

Since the project’s inception in 2017, CryptoPunks, created by Larva Labs, has generated over 683,000 ETH in sales volume, roughly $2 billion at the time of writing. The project currently boasts a floor price of 67.5 ETH ($207,000).

This was supposed to be the second time Sotheby’s has facilitated the sale of a major NFT lot, with the first being a $24.4 million collection of 101 Bored Apes sold in September. Rapper Ja Rule was among those in attendance at the New York auction house.

To say Sotheby’s has leaned into the growing world of digital art and crypto would be an understatement – the famed auction house reported over $100 million in NFT sales in 2021 alone, and on occasion has even accepted bids for non-NFT related artwork in ether, the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain.

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