Justin Sun / Twitter
- Crypto genius boy Justin Sun is the mysterious buyer of the $ 69 million NFT that was sold at Christie’s.
- Sun gained fame after paying $ 4.6 million to lunch with Warren Buffett.
- The crypto genius kid is also the founder of cryptocurrency companies Tron and Rainberry.
- See more stories on the Insider business page.
Crypto genius boy Justin Sun purchased a $ 69 million piece of digital art on Thursday at a record-breaking Christie’s auction.
Sun – who has already paid $ 4.6 million to lunch with Warren Buffett – bid $ 60.25 million for digital work, called “Everyday: the first 5000 days”. Including the buyer’s premium, the total cost of the digital art piece reached $ 69.3 million.
Sun reportedly paid for its digital purchase and the buyer’s premium using the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was created by digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple.
The work is a mosaic of all the images that Beeple has made since 2013. It is connected to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) that acts as a digital certificate of authenticity executed on the blockchain.
Sun, the founder of two cryptocurrency companies, Tron and Rainberry (formerly known as BitTorrent), first attracted media attention after paying $ 4.6 million to lunch with Warren Buffet and then decided to postpone the meeting for more than six months.
Sun also drew media attention after pledging $ 1 million to support Greta Thunberg’s campaign against climate change and saying he would donate $ 1.2 million to 100 people in 2020.
The 30-year-old crypto chief also invested $ 10 million in GameStop near the peak of the rally powered by Reddit.
Now, Sun will be in the limelight once again for making the largest non-fungible token purchase in history. Sun’s purchase was so big that only two physical artworks exceeded 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” for $ 84.6 million, according to ArtNet.
The NFT sale was also higher than any sale at the Christie’s auction house in the past year. The closest candidate to the NFT was Roy Lichtenstein’s “Nude With Joyous Painting”, which was sold by $ 46.2 million.
The sale of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is the latest in an explosion in the NFT market. In fact, according to a study by NonFungible.com, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, the NFT market grew 299% year on year in 2020 to more than $ 250 million.