Crypto boss eats banana art bought for $6.2m

A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat bananas in $6.2m (£4.9m) artwork he bought last week.

Justin Sun beat six others to claim Maurizio Cattelan’s famous 2019 work – a banana pipe attached to a wall – at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.

He ate the fruit during a press conference in Hong Kong where he used the occasion to draw parallels between art and cryptocurrency.

The banana is changed every time before the show, Mr. Sun bought the right to show the installation and a guide on how to change the fruit.

It has been eaten twice before – first best performing artist in 2019 and by a Student from South Korea in 2023 – but no one paid money to do that, let alone $6.2m.

“Eating it in a press conference can also be part of the history of paintings,” said Mr. Sun.

“It’s much better than other bananas,” he added.

The 34-year-old suspect said that he was clear about the job, and admitted that he had “nonsense questions” about whether the banana rotted.

The New York Times reported that a new banana was bought for 35 cents on the day of the auction last week, before it became one of the most expensive fruits in the world.

Each person who attended the event on Friday was given a banana and a roll of duct tape as a souvenir.

“Everyone has a banana to eat,” said Mr Langa.

Mr Sun runs the Tron blockchain network – a service where users can trade cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies which operate without banks, enabling the most secure transactions of places.

Mr Sun compared the artwork, and other abstract pieces like it, to NFTs.

These “inviolable tokens” are pieces of digital art that have no intrinsic value, other than that assigned by humans.

NFTs can be traded on platforms such as Mr.

Last year, he was indicted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for offering and selling unregistered security tokens. Mr Sun denies the charges and the case is ongoing.

This week, Mr Sun revealed that he has invested $30m in a crypto project backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.