Crypto Entrepreneur Eats $6.2M Banana Artwork
A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana featured in Maurizio Cattelan’s $6.2 million artwork, Comedian. The infamous piece, which consists of a banana taped to a wall, was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last week.
Justin Sun, who runs the Tron blockchain network, outbid six others to purchase the artwork. During a press conference in Hong Kong, he ate the banana to make a statement about the connection between art and cryptocurrency.
The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, and Sun bought the rights to display the piece along with a guide on how to replace the fruit. Although the banana has been eaten twice before—once by a performance artist in 2019 and again by a South Korean student in 2023—neither of them paid for the privilege like Sun did.
“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” Sun said. “It’s much better than other bananas,” he joked.
Sun, 34, admitted he was curious about the banana’s lifespan, saying he had “dumb questions” about whether the fruit would rot. According to The New York Times, the fresh banana was purchased for 35 cents the day of the auction but became one of the most expensive fruits in the world after Sun’s purchase.
At the auction, each attendee received a banana and duct tape as a souvenir. Sun remarked, “Everyone has a banana to eat.”
Sun is also a well-known figure in the cryptocurrency world, where he runs the Tron blockchain—a platform for digital currency transactions. He compared the banana artwork to NFTs (non-fungible tokens), a form of digital art that holds no intrinsic value beyond what people are willing to assign to it. Sun’s platform allows users to trade NFTs.
Last year, Sun was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for offering unregistered security tokens, a case he denies. This week, he revealed he invested $30 million in a crypto project backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.
