A tokenized version of a destroyed Banksy painting sold for nearly $400,000 on NFT marketplace OpenSea.
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:

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 NFT representing incinerated Banksy painting fetches nearly $400k

It has been quite an incendiary week for Irish traders due to the fallout and resignations triggered by the recent Davy 16 scandal. The art world was also ablaze this week when a group of financial traders in the blockchain industry purchased a Banksy artwork for $95,000 (€79,900) and set it on fire.

Injective Protocol, a three-year-old company that runs a decentralised platform for blockchains (open online networks that store ledgers of digital transactions), bought the screen-print entitled Morons from the Taglialatella Gallery in January. This week they took a match to it in an undisclosed location in New York and live-streamed the burning through a Twitter account called BurntBanksy. The work carried Banksy’s signature and was authenticated by Pest Control, the artists’ only certification company.

But it gets far more interesting or absurd – depending on your viewpoint – as the video that captured the burning of the work, which was one of a 500-print run, sold in the virtual world for $380,000 (€317,900) within days.

It may raise eyebrows that it was a work by Banksy, the anonymous English street artist and political activist, who himself was involved in a stunt which took the art world by storm in 2018. At a Sotheby’s sale in 2018, just as the hammer fell on Girl with Balloon, for which the buyer paid in excess of £1 million (€1.17 million), the piece went through a shredder in the frame. The buyer “began to realise that I would end up with my own piece of art history” and, with the new title Love is in the Bin for the shredded work, settled the bill.
So what was the goal of burning the Banksy piece? Through their spokesman, Mirza Uddin, the traders said it was “as an expression of art itself” and that the “physical piece will be forever memorialised” (albeit in a video of burning a signed print).
But cynics might beg to differ and suggest that, a bit like the artist himself, it was merely an antic to gain notoriety. There is also the notion that they were aiming to highlight a new form of digital assets known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Nothing to do with mushrooms, these are new registrations of ownership of a digital object online, which can be in many media, such as art, videos, music and online games. The non-fungible part means the object is unique and therefore irreplaceable, unlike cash or cryptocurrency, but it lives in the virtual world.
Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey is also entering the NFT marketplace selling his first ever tweet – its current bid is at $2.5 million (€2.1 million).

Before you guffaw at the notion, a work by Beeple, the graphic designer whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, sold on Thursday  for nearly $70 million (€58.5m)  at Christie’s, in the first ever sale by a major auction house of a piece of art that does not exist in physical form. “Everydays - The First 5000 Days” is a digital  collage of 5,000 individual images, made one-per-day over  thirteen years. The sale put Beeple in the top three most valuable living artists, Christie’s said.

While there is no denying that digital art is a medium, would you pay for something intangible, such as a video or digital rendering, that can be seen by millions online? Some critics have suggested that all you really have is a serial code linked to a blockchain database.

James O’Halloran of Adam’s Auctioneers says: “Younger people will embrace video as art much more easily than people of my generation and they will ‘get’ the concept of the burning Banksy much more readily than those of us with more traditional notions of what art is.”

The burning of the Banksy work and selling the virtual video on “is like a scene out of The Wolf of Wall Street”, according to auctioneer Ian Whyte, and O’ Halloran “is delighted when stories like this emerge as at least it gets people talking about art”.

When it comes to the torching of the print, O’Halloran says: “Rightly or wrongly, the act of destroying this artwork, of which there are many more copies, is creating, in viewers and readers of the story, a reaction and that is where the art exists.”

International seller Christie’s is the first of the traditional auction houses to enter the foray of this new marketplace with their Highsnobeity collection of non-physical art, which they say is “on the threshold of becoming the next ingeniously disruptive force in the art market”. While buyers will not walk away with something they can physically hold, these NFTs are “encrypted with the artist’s signature and the ownership is permanently attached to the piece”.

If you are trying to decide if the burning of the Banksy is art or con artistry, it may well be worth noting that the work – cremated by the traders and selling for three times its original price – was originally sold entitled I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy this S**t.


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Arts&Antiques: Is burning a Banksy artistic expression or attempt at notoriety

The decentralized NFT auction protocol built on Solana’s blockchain aims to scale its team with the latest capital raise, the founder of Burnt Finance told Blockworks.

Decentralized NFT auction protocol Burnt Finance has raised $8 million in a Series A to scale its team as it deploys and integrates new chains and product features, the founder of Burnt Finance, who goes under the alias Burnt Banksy, told Blockworks. 

“Over time, we will become an all encompassing multichain hub for NFTs by integrating DeFi functionality which include NFT lending, liquidity mining with staking incentives, fractionalization, and GameFi,” he said. 

The round was led by Animoca Brands and include investments also from Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, DeFiance, Valor Capital Group, Figment, Spartan Capital, Tribe Capital, Play Ventures, HashKey, Mechanism Capital, DeFi Alliance, Terra and Fantom, among others. 

“We are excited to have Animoca Brands lead our Series A, which will help tremendously as we look to partner with the hundreds of games and guilds within their umbrella,” Banksy said. “A number of prominent guilds and gaming focused VCs also participated in the round, which helps us gain first-hand access to a number of gaming projects,” he added. 

The company began through its “Burnt Banksy” campaign, when Injective Protocol, the Cosmos SDK-based decentralized exchange protocol — which incubated Burnt Finance — bought an original Banksy piece for $95,000 to burn it and broadcast it live on Twitter in March 2021. From there, it created an NFT of the piece and sold it for about 229 ether, or $400,000, at the time on NFT marketplace OpenSea. 

“Despite the successful sale, a number of challenges were faced while holding the auction, from expensive Ethereum gas fees to bad actors manipulating the bidding process,” the protocol said in a statement. “After this experience, it became clear that a fully-decentralized marketplace was needed,” it added. 

The protocol was founded shortly after the stunt in April 2021 and accumulated over 200,000 users on its waitlist to date and launched its non-fungible token auction protocol mainnet on Monday, Burnt Banksy shared.

Burnt Finance’s protocol will allow users to completely control their auctions by enabling the minting and trading of NFTs in a permissionless ecosystem, it said. The platform will support NFTs, digital assets, among other items and can transact quickly with minimal fees due to its creation on Solana’s architecture.

The protocol plans to expand its product offerings into initiatives like lending or GameFi in the coming months. “We already have a few collaborations in the works with major GameFi platforms which will go live in the next month or so,” Burnt Banksy said. However, he could not disclose additional details about those product plans. 

Burnt Finance raised $3 million in a seed round in May 2021, led by Multicoin Capital and Alameda Research. There is no valuation disclosed at this time due to non-disclosure agreements, Burnt Banksy said. 

“The Burnt team and product vision have both grown significantly since the close of the seed round,” Banksy noted.

“We are now looking to expand onto other chains such as Terra and Fantom while building out new functionalities that bridge the worlds of DeFi with NFTs,” he added. 

Burnt Finance has deployed testnet contracts into layer-1 protocols like Cardano, but plans to be fully functional on “multiple chains” before the end of 2022, Burnt Banksy said.

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Animoca Brands Led $8M Series A for Burnt Finance

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NFT representing incinerated Banksy painting fetches nearly $400k

Arts&Antiques: Is burning a Banksy artistic expression or attempt at notoriety

Animoca Brands Led $8M Series A for Burnt Finance

NFT representing incinerated Banksy painting fetches nearly $400k

Arts&Antiques: Is burning a Banksy artistic expression or attempt at notoriety

Animoca Brands Led $8M Series A for Burnt Finance

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