Justin Sun, the founder of a smart contract-enabled cryptocurrency called ‘Tron’, has revealed that he bought an NFT avatar for $10.5 million. The NFT, named ‘Joker’, owing to its look, is part of a series of Tron-native NFT called Tpunks, that seeks to reproduce the style and of course, the success of the known Cryptopunks series, but on the Tron blockchain.
Justin Sun buys NFT for $10.5 million.
Justin Sun, Tron blockchain founder, announced today that he bought an NFT avatar for up to $10.5 million worth of Tron. The NFT he bought is identified as #3442 but called “Joker,” obviously due to its striking semblance to the popular Batman villain. Joker is part of the Tpunks series, a collection of NFTs that undeniably tries to recreate the art style of another line of NFTs on Ethereum, a very successful line, in fact, called the Cryptopunks.
Although the series contains about 10,000 avatars, some of the avatars (like Joker), possess very rare traits, thus making them especially wanted by collectors. According to DappRadar, the project seems to be picking up momentum and as at the time of writing, has already climbed to fourth place rank in collectible dapps. The prices of these rare NFTs, have also somehow skyrocketed on the platform, with some reaching more than $800K.
This is absolutely not Justin Sun’s first venture into the NFT market. Sun was a very active bidder on Christie’s sale of Beeple’s NFT “Everydays: the First 5,000 Days”. According to Sun’s statement, he made a bid of $60 million to acquire the asset at the time but was outbid at the very last minute by an anonymous buyer who bid just $250K above his own $60 million.
NFT Craze
Non Fungible Tokens, or NFTs as they are otherwise called, have been causing quite the stir in the cryptocurrency space and Justin Sun is not the first to be drawn into the movement. Several famous influencers, actors, and even rap artists have also gotten into the space to take advantage of this new kind of media. The likes of Jay-Z, the famous musician, who partnered with Sotheby’s in June to auction an NFT inspired by his “Reasonable Doubt” album, called “Heir to the Throne.” The musician also changed his profile picture on Twitter to display a Cryptopunk, a move that fuelled the belief of some of his followers that he had purchased one.
Countless other projects have also sold millions of dollars in NFTs. The main project, Cryptopunks, surpassed $1 billion in sales last week, being the third NFT-based project to reach that number after Axie Infinity and Open sea. Even institutional markets are not left behind. Some of them like Visa, the multinational payments giant, also caught the NFT fever, and purchased a CryptoPunk (#7610) to add to its collection on August 23, calling NFTs a “new era” of collecting.
