Less than a week after Christie’s sold a digital collage to an investor who paid $69 million in cryptocurrency, rival auction house Sotheby’s said it was considering an option to eventually let bidders use digital currencies to pay for physical artworks—from prints to Pablo Picassos—as well as digital works.
– Sotheby’s Enters NFT Digital Art Market, Considers Broader Cryptocurrency Options
Sotheby’s is 276 years old. Christie’s is 254.
We saw last year how other century-old institutions had begun investing in, parking money in and/or getting into the business of cryptocurrency. That list included Mass Mutual, State Street and the SEC:
That’s why its hard to witness the finance ministries and central banks of young countries – China, India, Nigeria – take a hard stand against it.
These countries are roughly sixty and seventy years old, but China was reborn economically just forty years ago; India ten years later.
Their institutions should be among the least protective, most imaginative and most welcoming of new technology.