Fungibullx Bets Digital Art Belongs In The Auction House, Starting With Patrick Hughes
New York, New York, November 11th, 2026, Chainwire
Powered by ElmonX, FungibullX is making the case that the next chapter of digital art looks less like a marketplace and more like an auction house. Its first sale belongs to Patrick Hughes, the British artist who invented reverspective, with two generative collections that bring his rainbows and his sunshine back to the screen.
For most of its short history, the market for digital art has borrowed its habits from the trading floor rather than the saleroom. Collections were released by the thousand, prices were set by whoever moved first, and collectors were often left to work out for themselves what they were buying and why it mattered. FungibullX, a new auction house for fine digital art and collectibles, is built on the opposite assumption: that a work is worth more when someone has chosen it with care, and when its price is settled in the open.
The platform, powered by ElmonX, sells curated work by established artists, beginning with ranked auctions, with the starting price, the current bid and the closing time stated plainly on every lot. It describes itself as built for the artists who shaped art and for the collectors who get to keep it. Its inaugural sale is a clear test of that idea: two generative collections drawn from Sunshine (1974) and Colour Process (1984), original prints by Patrick Hughes, a painter who has spent more than sixty years making pictures that refuse to sit still.
The Auction House
The choice of format is the point. A marketplace lists; an auction house selects, catalogues and stands behind what it sells, and the price that emerges from competing bidders tells the market something a fixed listing never can. Traditional houses spent centuries building trust on exactly those habits. FungibullX is trying to carry them over to work that lives on a screen, at a moment when many of the collectors who arrived during digital art’s speculative years are looking for reasons to stay that have more to do with the art than the flip.
“Digital art has no shortage of places to buy and sell. What we wanted to build was an auction house in the traditional sense: somewhere that chooses what it sells, presents every work with its history and lets the bidding decide the rest,” said Jacob Elmon, co-founder of FungibullX. “We wanted our first sale to show what that looks like, and there was no better place to start than Patrick. He has spent sixty years playing with the way we see light and space.”
It does not start from zero. ElmonX, the company powering the platform, was founded in 2020 by Jacob and Brandon Elmon and has built its name on licensed fine-art digital collectibles. Working with Bridgeman Images, the fine-art licensing specialist, it released officially licensed digital editions of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Rodin’s The Thinker, alongside works associated with Leonardo, Monet and Hokusai. More recently it brought together the Piet Mondrian / Holtzman Trust and Doodles on a collection billed as the first time the Trust had approved a reimagining of Mondrian’s original works as digital and physical collectibles.
The relationship with Hughes is not new either. ElmonX has released digital editions of his work before, both on its own platform and on VeVe, where his first series in 2022 sold more than 3,000 digital collectibles. That makes FungibullX’s opening sale less a cold introduction than the next step in an existing collaboration.
The Painter of Paradox
Hughes was born in Birmingham in 1939 and has long lived and worked in London. He held his first solo show in 1961 at the Portal Gallery in London, and in 1964 made the first of the works that would come to define him: a reverspective, a three-dimensional relief painting in which the parts that appear farthest away are physically closest to the viewer. Walk past one and the picture seems to turn with, a trick of perception that the mind keeps falling for even after it has been explained.
From the 1970s into the mid-1980s, the rainbow became his other great subject, and he treated it with the same mischief. His rainbows are solid things, posted through letterboxes, dumped in bins, parcelled up and left casting shadows, everything a real rainbow cannot be. Plenty of people took them as cheerful. Hughes has tended to see them as visual puns about the impossibility of fixing a fleeting experience into an object.
The work has earned him a place in the collections of the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library, and in 2014 the University of London awarded him a Doctor of Science for his contribution to the psychology of perception. Across six decades his subject has stayed remarkably constant: the gap between what we see and what is really there. That makes him an unusually natural fit for digital art, a medium in which the picture is, quite literally, made of light.
The First Sale
The inaugural sale reimagines two of Hughes’s original prints, Sunshine (1974) and Colour Process (1984), as generative art, with 100 unique works drawn from each.
Sunshine (1974) starts from a print in which Hughes draws a bare room in a handful of fine lines. Through the window, sunlight arrives not as a glow but as a solid, thick slabs of yellow that fall to the floor heavy enough to cast their own shadow. In the generative collection the room stays exactly as he drew it, and only the light changes. The works draw on 64 palettes that carry the room from full daylight to deep night, with 9 kinds of motion and 6 rhythms.
Colour Process (1984) began as a print of a rainbow pouring through a window into a home computer and coming out the other side as chunky pixels. More than forty years later, the machine switches back on. The generator combines 16 motifs, 10 palettes and 9 effects, and outside the window the world shifts from grey autumn light to starry nights and fireworks. Of the 100 works, 78 are animated and 22 hold still. One of them responds to the viewer.
“Colour Process was made in 1984, more than forty years ago. These ancient pixels show up on the screen to remind us that the reality of the rainbow (itself an illusion), can be represented by another form of coloured light,” said Patrick Hughes.
Selling Light
Sunshine (1974), in a sense, explains the whole sale. Hughes has always treated light as something solid enough to own, and FungibullX’s argument is that work by an artist of his standing deserves to be sold the way his paintings are: chosen with care, presented with its history and priced in the open rather than listed and left. Auction is how those paintings have long changed hands, through houses including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Bonhams. At Phillips, a 2018 painting titled Appropriately sold for £35,560 against an estimate of £20,000 to £30,000.
“Sunshine came through the window like a brick,” said Hughes. “The study of light is so important for artists, daylight is like a solid that pours into our rooms through the windows. The colour of light can change from the glow of the sun to the blue of midnight.”
How the Sale Works
Both collections go to ranked auction on FungibullX, opening on Wednesday 11 November 2026 at 17:00 UTC (12PM EST). The format suits an edition of this kind: instead of one winner taking one lot, bidders compete for places across the full set of 100 works, and the final ranking decides who takes them home. When each sale closes, the top 100 bids win, and every winner pays the same price: the lowest winning bid.
Bidding opens on fungibullx.com at 0.01974 ETH for Sunshine and 0.01984 ETH for Colour Process, starting bids that follow the year of each print. The two sales close 30 minutes apart on 12 November, Sunshine at 17:00 UTC (12PM EST) and Colour Process at 17:30 UTC (12:30PM EST).
It is Worth Watching
Whether the auction house model can restore some of the confidence digital art lost after its boom years is a question no single sale will settle. Over time, collectors will judge FungibullX on the artists it brings in after Hughes, on how its auctions hold up once the novelty fades and on whether curation proves to be more than a word on a landing page. Those are fair tests, and by putting its starting prices and bids in plain view, the platform has invited them.
Starting with Hughes is still a statement of intent. Here is an artist whose work is held by the Tate, with six decades of exhibitions behind him and an auction record to match. His highest result came in 2015, when For the Venice Biennale, a 2005 construction, sold at Christie’s in London for £98,500, far above its £20,000 to £30,000 estimate. A year later, three of his works were among the pieces from David Bowie’s collection that Sotheby’s brought to auction. His work has always asked whether what we see is really there, and now he offers two collections that ask the same question in light. For a platform arguing that digital art deserves the seriousness of the saleroom, it is hard to think of a more fitting opening lot.
About FungibullX
FungibullX is an auction house for fine digital art and collectibles, powered by ElmonX. It works with established artists to present curated sales, run at launch as ranked auctions. Its inaugural sale features two generative collections drawn from Sunshine (1974) and Colour Process (1984), original prints by British artist Patrick Hughes. Fungibull, a separate platform for digital art analytics and more, is also coming soon, along with a FungibullX auction of digital collectibles of Piet Mondrian’s original works, approved by the Mondrian / Holtzman Trust.
Learn more at fungibullx.com and follow FungibullX on X at @FungibullX.