Sotheby’s, the major auction house, has sold Banksy’s physical artwork “Love is in the Air” for $ 12.9 million.
It has been reported that the physical artwork was offered at a Contemporary Art Evening Auction that also featured “Versus Medici” by Jean-Michel Basquiat selling for nearly $51 million.
However, Sotheby’s announced on Twitter that the auction involved a 14-minute bidding battle among four entities. The auction house emphasized that the sale marks the first time cryptocurrency was accepted as a payment option for a piece of physical artwork.
#AuctionUpdate: Following a 14-minute bidding battle between 4 bidders, Banksy’s iconic protest image ‘Love is in the Air’ achieves $12.9 million. The sale marks the first time #cryptocurrency was accepted as a payment option for a physical artwork. #Banksy pic.twitter.com/uKIYeUu3IU — Sotheby's (@Sothebys) May 12, 2021
The report said that according to the auction lot page, the bidders were able to pay using two major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) through Sotheby’s partnership with Coinbase Commerce.
Sotheby’s stated:
“The funds must be sent from an approved wallet or exchange, including: Coinbase, Coinbase Custody Trust, Fidelity Digital Assets Services, Gemini, or Paxos.”
Earlier, Sotheby’s officially announced its plans to accept cryptocurrency as part of Banksy’s artwork auction last week in a move to further explore cryptocurrency payments after debuting nonfungible tokens (NFTs) earlier this year.
Street art with crypto? Sotheby's auctioned Banksy's iconic protest artwork "Love is in the air" allowing bidders to participate with BTC and ETH. The art piece was sold for $13M worth in crypto. https://t.co/pOOaUMqOhF — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) May 13, 2021
On May 6, the auction house announced another NFT auction called “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale.” Scheduled to take place between June 3 and June 10, the sale will feature a digital object from the iconic NFT collection CryptoPunks.
This comes shortly after New York-based auction house Christie’s sold nine CryptoPunks tokens for nearly $17 million combined.
Thus, the company previously auctioned Mike Winkelmann’s digital artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” in March, netting almost $70 million for the piece.
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Slash Gear