The highest bid of BUSD 150,500 was put on the artwork of Da Vinci at the first NFT Binance auction at the Hermitage.
Despite the usually unfavorable stance of the Russian government towards cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), a famous state-based museum benefits the market by earning hundreds of thousands of dollars with non-fungible tokens or NFTs.
The Russian State Hermitage Museum, the largest museum in the world, has finished its opening NFT auction on Binance’s NFT platform, selling 5 copies of tokenized pieces of art from artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh.
There were five NFT copies of Hermitage artworks for sale including the Composition VI of Wassily Kandinsky, Judith of Giorgione, The Madonna and The Child of Da Vinci, Claude Monet’s Garden Corner, and Lilac Bush of van Gogh.
According to statistics from Binance’s NFT platform, the Hermitage sale earned a stablecoin called Binance USD (BUSD) of moreover $444,000. Binance is the largest exchange of cryptocurrency in the world.
The highest bidder in the auction paid BUSD 150,500 for a computerized portrayal of the Madonna and Child by Da Vinci.
As Cointelegraph has previously shown, the Hermitage will receive 100% of its NFT income. When the Hermitage revealed in July its plans to issue NFTs, its department of law worked with the legal consulting company LFCS to produce and market NFTs using a model “fully following Russian law.”
In the meanwhile, payments in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin in Russia are not yet permitted. Dmitry Peskov, Russia’s official spokesperson for Vladimir Putin, underlined today earlier that Russia does not have reason to recognize Bitcoin as legal money since it would be damaging for the financial structure of the nation. Russian crypto-law “On Digital Financial Assets” in January 2021 legally prevented anyone from making payments for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
