Last Modified: November 19th, 2021

One of the most iconic, well-known auction house, the 277-year-old Sotheby’s will allow live bidding in ETH in an upcoming virtual exhibition that will take place in Decentraland. This exhibition will feature two pieces from Banksy, who is perhaps the most famous figure in street art. The two pieces are named “Love Is In The Air” and “Trolley Hunters.” It will also feature a copy of the U.S. constitution.

Sotheby’s was the first auction house to accept payments in cryptocurrency for auctioned works of art, and now becomes the first auction house to allow live bidding using crypto.

As discussed in the article yesterday, the Ethereum blockchain is the main network where NFT minting and transactions occur, and that ETH is the preferred cryptocurrency in the NFT community, and thus ETH was the chosen cryptocurrency for live bidding. However, the winner bidders do not have to pay in ETH; they could also choose to pay in fiat currency, BTC, or USDC.

The two pieces from Banksy will likely be purchased by high-net-worth private collectors. However, when it comes to the U.S. constitution, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) was created to keep the digital copy of the constitution available to the public, instead of being locked away in a private collection. Named ConstitutionDAO, the organization raised over $40 million in funds in just a week from over 15,000 participants, including one anonymous donor who provided 4 million to the cause.

This news has caused Decentraland’s coin, MANA, to spike in prices, while the rest of the crypto market continues to trend downwards (MANA is not available for trading on BTCC). Even though this news should have benefited ETH in terms of prices, it is still down more than 7% over the last 24 hours, to a price of $3,980.5 as of this article’s conclusion.

ETH price chart last 24 hours (15 minute intervals)