The $6.2 million duct-taped banana can’t stay out of the news for long, it seems, and the company it keeps just gets stranger and stranger. The Bitcoin 2025 conference is underway in Las Vegas, and crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun made a splash there on Thursday, presenting Maurizio Cattelan’s artwork Comedian (2019) to the notorious Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is just a few months out of maximum-security prison, where he was to spend the rest of his life until he was pardoned by Donald Trump. In a video posted to X by user Elizabeth Olson, Sun presents Ulbricht with a gift box holding a duct-taped banana. Someone off-screen asks about the fruit’s perishability. “In a week, I’m going to have to replace it,” says Ulbricht in response. But that’s the point, says Sun, using cryptocurrency lingo: “It’s a decentralized banana,” he adds, to laughter.

BREAKING: @justinsuntron gifts $6.2M banana duct tape art to @RealRossU pic.twitter.com/zGVARGhJhT — Elizabeth Olson (@ElizabethOls0n) May 29, 2025

Many, many commentors on X are not in on that joke even after it’s explained, asking, Didn’t he eat the banana? Yes, Sun did, in a press conference at Hong Kong’s posh Peninsula Hotel on November 29, saying, “It’s much better than other bananas,” as the Guardian reported. He had bought the banana just days before, at Sotheby’s New York, for $6.2 million, far more than its $1.5 million high estimate. The piece had been sold, in three editions, for $120,000 and $150,000 at Perrotin’s booth at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2017.  Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s New York. Courtesy of Sotheby’s. Conceptual art, of which Cattelan’s work is an example, relies more on the idea than the physical reality; Cattelan provocatively pushes this notion to its edge, including in his work an eminently perishable item. (It’s just one in a long tradition of artworks incorporating such materials.) It could be said that cryptocurrency is in some ways akin t