A non-fungible token, or NFT, depicting an incinerated painting created by renowned British street artist, Banksy, has sold for nearly $400,000.
On March 8, the token was sold on NFT marketplace OpenSea for 228.69 Ether — worth roughly $382,000 at the time of writing. The sale followed three days of bidding, with approximately 70 bidders pushing the price up from a starting price of 0.00001 ETH.
The NFT was created by “Burnt Banksy," a group of crypto investors who purchased Banky’s painting “Morons” for roughly $100,000 in February.
Morons is a painting satirizing the art industry that depicts a bustling auction for a framed canvas donned with capitalized words reading: “I can’t believe you morons buy this shit.” On March 4, the artwork’s owners incinerated the painting on a Twitter live stream at an unknown location in Brooklyn, New York.
The Morons NFT was sold to ‘Galaxy,’ an OpenSea user who currently has four NFTs on display, including a satirical piece depicting renowned artist Frida Kahlo as Kim Kardashian in her infamous ‘internet-breaking’ photoshoot from 2014.
While the token is the first NFT to represent a verified Banksy painting that has been incinerated, it is not the first to depict an artwork that was destroyed after being tokenized.
In August 2020, former ‘That 70’s Show’ star Ashton Kutcher created a tokenized representation of a notepad scribble depicting a dozen pairs of eyes, a star, and his signature. The NFT was put up for charity auction on Cryptograph marketplace.
In February, the investor who purchased an NFT created by celebrity Lindsay Lohan then proceeded to burn it — sending the token to a verifiably un-spendable wallet address so that nobody can own or trade the token in the future. The decision was commended by the popular crypto commentator, DeFi Dude: