- A 101-carat diamond has sold at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for $12 million, with the buyer paying in cryptocurrency
- The sale comes two weeks after the auction house sold an NFT of the World Wide Web source code for $5.4 million
- A Sotheby’s executive spoke of cryptocurrency as “humanity’s newest universal currency”
A beautiful 101-carat diamond sold to an anonymous buyer for more than $12 million yesterday, with the buyer electing to pay in cryptocurrency. Sotheby’s listed the pear-shaped jewel from jewel house Diacore last month, alerting potential buyers that they could pay in cryptocurrency if they wanted to. The auction closed yesterday, with Sotheby’s confirming the sale price and the fact that cryptocurrency was used to purchase the stunning diamond, although they did not specify which cryptocurrency in particular was used.
Sotheby’s Extends Cryptocurrency Experiment
Sotheby’s has been getting into the cryptocurrency spirit in 2021, accepting crypto for auctions and also auctioning off NFTs, such as an NFT of the source code for the World Wide Web. The auction house announced in June that they would be selling the 101.38-carat diamond at the same time as saying they would accept payments in Bitcoin or Ethereum, presumably because these would be the easiest to liquidate.
Sotheby’s estimated the diamond to fetch between $10 million and $15 million, with the final price of $12 million fitting inside this estimate. This means the buyer would have had to hand over approximately 366 BTC or 5,818 ETH. Since diamond prices per carat have risen almost continuously since the market started tracking the price in 1960, the buyer has swapped the volatility and potentially huge gains of crypto for the slow and steady but largely predictable gains of diamonds.
“Humanity’s Newest Universal Currency”
Sotheby’s announced its pleasure at the sale, with Wenhao Yu, deputy chairman of the auction house’s jewelry department in Asia, lauding the use of cryptocurrency:
We are thrilled to witness a historical moment, when one of the Earth’s oldest and rarest treasures was purchased using humanity’s newest universal currency. By introducing this innovative payment option to our luxury sale, we open up new possibilities and expand our reach into a whole new clientele, many of whom are from the digitally savvy generation.
With Sotheby’s seemingly very keen on increasing the use of cryptocurrency in their auctions there is a good chance that this is the first of many such auctions we will see in the years to come.
