Beeple NFT Price Could Have Been Even Higher Than $69M — Only If Crypto's Controversy Child Had His Way

Tron TRON/USD founder Justin Sun who participated in the auction of Beeple’s artwork sold on Thursday for $69 million revealed how the bidding reached sky-high levels.

What Happened: Sun, who bid on the artwork titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” said on Twitter that his final effective bid was $60 million, plus $9 million in buyer premium. 

The cryptocurrency entrepreneur said that he was outbid by another buyer in the last 20 seconds of the Christie’s auction by $250,000.

“Difference was less than 0.3% of the total price,” observed the entrepreneur who courted controversy when he canceled a private lunch with Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) (NYSE: BRK-B) CEO Warren Buffett after winning an auction with a record $4.5 million bid.

Sun posted videos of him bidding on the art where he can be heard in the background during the process. 

“Then at the last 38 secs of the original bidding session, another bidder raised the stake to $50.7 MIL [and] Christie’s system extended the bidding session for another 95 secs,” tweeted Sun.

After a system refresh, the bid was further raised to $50.75 million and in the last 40 seconds of the extended session, it went as high as $60.25 million, as per Sun.

Sun claims that he tried to update his bid to $70 million in the last 30 seconds but his offer was not accepted by Christie’s system even though there were still 20 seconds left.

Why It Matters: The entrepreneur wrote to Christie’s to address the matter of his last bid but the auctioneer said that his bid did not reach the bidding system “in time prior to the lot closing,” as per a Tweet shared by Sun.

“To avoid these types of disputes in the future, ALL bids should be transparent & utilizing blockchain technology would satisfy this requirement,” said Sun. 

Christie’s auctioned the non-fungible token-based artwork for $69 million on Thursday, which put Beeple “among the top three most valuable living artists.”

Also auctioned on Thursday was the “Bad Luck Brian” meme, which was sold for $36,000 in an auction denominated in Ethereum ETH/USD. 

See Also: As NFT Crypto Craze Spreads To Domain Names, DigitalArtists.com Sells For $300,000

The NFT trend has been picking up pace, this week a Banksy artwork dubbed “Morons” was sold for $394,000 after the original was destroyed by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

Grimes, partner of Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk, and Lindsay Lohan too have sold NFT artwork recently as well. 

Price Action: TRON traded 0.86% higher at $0.051 at press time. Bitcoin BTC/USD and ETH traded 3.07% and 1.46% higher at $57,098.06 and $1,808.74 respectively.

Image: Courtesy of Christie’s auction