November 30, 2024 - Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun bought a banana, duct-taped to the wall, for $6.24  million (around Rs 52 crore) at a Sotheby’s auction house in New York on November 20 and then fulfilled his promise that he would eat the banana. Yesterday, Sun ate the world’s most expensive banana in front of a packed press conference in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who had bought the banana from a fruit vendor and presented it as a conceptual art piece titled Comedian at the auction, is in shock. Shah Alam, a Bangladeshi immigrant who sells fruits near the auction house in New York, burst into tears when he found out that the ordinary banana he sold for 35 cents (around Rs 29) had been sold for millions of dollars.

Addressing the media, the 34-year-old Chinese entrepreneur said, while eating the banana, that it was “tastier than other ordinary bananas”. The Tron founder compared conceptual art like Comedian to NFT (non-fungible token) art, (something which is unique and irreplaceable), and decentralised blockchain technology. He called it "performance art", likening it to a blockchain where “the concept is the true value.”

Sun outbid six others to claim Cattelan's infamous 2019 work Comedian at Sotheby's auction.