The prestigious auction house Sotheby’s has already been the venue for several sales of physical or digital art objects (in the form of NFT), with payments in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, this is a first for such a huge diamond, which will be paid handsomely in cryptos.
Swapping diamond carats for cryptocurrencies
Art and jewelry auction house Sotheby’s announced in late June that it was offering for sale a very large, colorless 101.38-carat diamond, soberly named “Key 101.38.”
As MarketWatch reports, the sale was successfully concluded on Friday, July 9, as the diamond was sold for a cool $12.3 million.
The diamond was offered for sale from the Hong Kong branch of Sotheby’s and could be paid for in bitcoins (BTC) or ethers (ETH). However, it is impossible to know with which of the 2 crypto-assets the anonymous buyer who won the final auction paid for his diamond, which would correspond for information to about 385 bitcoins at the current price.
In any case, crypto-currencies seem to be taking over from the traditional fiat currencies (dollar, euro, …) for art and collectibles sales.
As mentioned above, Sotheby’s had already auctioned a Banksy work payable in cryptos (in BTC and ETH too).
Before this arrival in jewelry and physical art, the cryptosphere had already been noticed thanks to digital works carried by non-fungible tokens (NFT). Last March, Christie’s auction house sold a Beeple NFT for $69 million.
