(Market Insider) – Sun-who once paid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett-bid $60.25 million for the digital work, called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days.” Including the buyer’s premium the total cost for the piece of digital art came to $69.3 million.
Sun reportedly paid for his digital purchase and the buyer’s premium using the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was created by the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple.
The work is a mosaic of every image that Beeple has made since 2013. It’s connected to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) which acts a digital certificate of authenticity that runs on the blockchain.
Sun, the founder of two cryptocurrency companies, Tron and Rainberry (formerly known as BitTorrent), first garnered attention from the media after he paid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffet and then decided to postpone the meetup for over six months.
Sun also drew the media’s gaze after he pledged $1 million to support Greta Thunberg’s campaign against climate change and said he would give away $1.2 million to 100 people during 2020.
The 30-year-old crypto boss also invested $10 million in GameStop near the peak of the Reddit-fueled rally.
Now, Sun will be in the spotlight once again for making the largest Non-Fungible Token purchase in history. Sun’s purchase was so large, only two works of physical art surpassed the piece’s sticker price in 2020.
Wu Bin’s “Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock” sold for $76.6 million and Francis Bacon’s “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus” sold for $84.6 million, according to ArtNet.
The NFT sale was also larger than any sale at Christie’s auction house in all of last year. The closest contender to the NFT was Roy Lichtenstein’s “Nude With Joyous Painting” that sold for $46.2 million.
The sale of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is the latest in an explosion in the market for NFTs. In fact, according to a study from NonFungible.com, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, the NFT market grew 299% year-over-year in 2020 to more than $250 million.
But on March 13, Christie’s has announced that the work was acquired by Metakovan, the pseudonymous founder and financier of Metapurse, dispelling rumors that Justin Sun had won the auction.
“When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” Metakovan said in a statement. “And here’s why—it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion”./.
