Ever wondered what millions of dollars tasted like? Well, apparently, a banana.
Justin Sun, founder of layer-1 blockchain Tron, ate the banana that he bought for $6.24 million last week at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in New York. The yellow fruit was part of Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous 2019 conceptual artwork of a duct-taped banana, called “Comedian,” which has become a highly memeable art piece—with two related meme coins to boot.
孙哥现场吃🍌 pic.twitter.com/qYi2UJ6zYl
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At the Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, the Tron founder gathered journalists to give a speech about the “iconic” artwork he had recently purchased. Behind him was a plain white wall with Comedian taped to it. He then peeled it off the wall and started chowing down.
“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun said to the crowd after his first bite, according to the Guardian. “It’s really quite good.”
Fortunately, the banana hadn’t been sitting there for five years before Sun decided to eat it.
After winning the bid for the artwork, the Tron founder was provided with instructions on how to properly present and treat the piece, along with a certificate of authenticity. A key part of the instructions was to regularly replace the fruit, as otherwise it’d inevitably go mouldy.
According to The Guardian, Sun drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency before eating the banana. To that point, there are already two Solana meme coins based on the $6.2 million artwork.
Banana Tape Wall (BTW) has climbed 10% over the past 24 hours to a market cap of $1.7 million, reposting Sun’s stunt. While the larger of the two tokens Comedian (Ban) has climbed 9.5% to a market cap of $138 million.
On Monday, Sun announced a $30 million investment in the Trump-family backed World Liberty Financial (WLFI) project, through the purchase of the WLFI governance token. The project is expected to launch as a borrowing and lending crypto service on Ethereum. Decrypt also learned that the project plans to issue a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.
“The U.S. is becoming the blockchain hub,” Sun wrote, following his investment. “And Bitcoin owes it to Donald Trump!”