Crypto boss eats banana paintings purchased for $6.2m

A Chinese language-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has adopted by on his promise to eat the banana from a $6.2m (£4.9m) paintings he purchased final week.

Justin Solar outbid six others to say Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious 2019 work Comic – a banana duct-taped to a wall – at Sotheby’s public sale home in New York.

He ate the fruit throughout a information convention in Hong Kong the place he used the second to attract parallels between the paintings and cryptocurrency.

The banana is usually changed earlier than exhibitions, with Mr Solar shopping for the precise to show the set up together with a information on how you can change the fruit.

It has been eaten twice earlier than – first by a efficiency artist in 2019 and once more by a South Korean scholar in 2023 – however neither paid any cash to take action, not to mention $6.2m.

“Consuming it at a press convention may also turn out to be part of the paintings’s historical past,” Mr Solar mentioned.

“It is significantly better than different bananas,” he added.

The 34-year-old mentioned he was intrigued by the work, admitting he had “dumb questions” about whether or not the banana rotted.

The New York Instances reported a recent banana was purchased for 35 cents on the day of final week’s public sale, earlier than turning into probably one of the costly fruits on this planet.

Every attendee on the occasion on Friday was given a banana and a roll of duct tape as a memento.

“Everybody has a banana to eat,” Mr Solar mentioned.

Mr Solar runs the Tron blockchain community – a service the place customers can commerce in cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that function impartial of banks, providing the potential of very safe decentralised transactions.

Mr Solar in contrast the paintings, and different summary items prefer it, to NFTs.

These “non-fungible tokens” are items of digital paintings that haven’t any intrinsic worth, aside from that prescribed by individuals.

NFTs might be traded on platforms like Mr Solar’s.

Final 12 months, he was charged by the US Securities and Alternate Fee for providing and promoting unregistered safety tokens. Mr Solar denies the fees and the case is ongoing.

This week, Mr Solar disclosed he made a $30m funding in a crypto challenge backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.