Crypto Billionaire Justin Sun Eats $6.2m Banana
Justin Sun. Photo: MelfarraTron via Wikicommons.
Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun has become the third person to ingest Maurizio Cattelan‘s wall-bound banana, Comedian (2019). Sun outbid six people for the artwork at Sotheby’s in New York last week, paying over four times its high estimate of $1.5 million.
‘Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,’ Sun told journalists and influencers in Hong Kong on Friday. Before chomping down the fruit, he compared conceptual art to blockchain technology, noting both are immaterial.
According to Bloomberg, Sun invested U.S. $30 million in World Liberty Financial (WLF) tokens, a decentralised finance project ‘inspired’ by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. In a keynote address at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee—and later posted on X—Trump stated his ambition for the U.S. to become the ‘crypto capital of the planet’.
After his investment, Sun became known as the largest holder of the WLF crypto token and was appointed as an adviser to the project a day later.
Sun, whose net worth is estimated at $1.4 billion, founded the Tron (TRX) blockchain in 2017. He is the face of the cryptocurrency exchange HTX (formerly Huobi), which earlier this year—for a second time—withdrew its application for a license to operate in Hong Kong, where he currently lives. Last March, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. charged Sun and his companies with fraud and other securities violations. The SEC simultaneously charged eight celebrities, including Hollywood star Lindsay Lohan and influencer Jake Paul, for illegally touting TRX and/or BitTorrent (BTT) without disclosing they were compensated for doing so.
Comedian first featured at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, where the $120,000 artwork was swallowed by performance artist David Datuna. The same thing happened when the work was exhibited at Seoul Museum of Art in 2023, this time, by a Korean art student. —[O]
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