Banksy Paintings Sell for 3,093 ETH in Auction House First
Two paintings from contemporary artist Banksy sold for over $12 million in the first Sotheby’s sale denominated in ETH.
Nov 19, 2021 at 12:15 a.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/AW33RLAEWJDO3MALDE3UVKUKGA.jpg)
Sotheby's auction of Bansky art (Eli Tan/CoinDesk)
A pair of paintings from contemporary artist Banksy have sold for a combined 3,093 ETH in an auction at Sotheby’s on Thursday night.
As CoinDesk previously reported, the sale is the first time the auction house has denominated a sale in cryptocurrency. The pieces, “Trolley Hunters” and “Love Is In The Air” (2006) were estimated to sell for $5 million-$7 million and $4 million-$6 million respectively, and both largely met expectations with sales worth $6,698,400 and $8,077,200 – a combined 3,093 ETH.
Accepting bids in crypto is part of a larger cryptocurrency-focused push from the auctioneers. In October, Sotheby’s launched “Sotheby’s Metaverse,” a virtual gallery for the live auction event.
Crypto fans are now closely watching an auction scheduled for later in the night: the sale of one of 13 remaining copies of the United States Constitution, which will include bidding from a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
A DAO is a group of people on the internet using various tools to exercise governance decisions relating to blockchain protocols, pooled investments or any number of other experiments.
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Andrew Thurman was a tech reporter at CoinDesk with a focus on DeFi.
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