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Sotheby’s Sells Rare Diamond for $12.3M in Crypto

The auction house said "a milestone was reached in the adoption of cryptocurrencies."

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 1:23 p.m. Published Jul 9, 2021, 7:02 p.m.

Sotheby’s, the 277-year-old British auction house, sold a rare 101.38-carat diamond for HK$95.1 million (US$12.3 million) in cryptocurrency on Friday in a Hong Kong auction to an anonymous buyer.

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The auction house said the sale of the gemstone shows that a “milestone was reached in the adoption of cryptocurrencies.”
The diamond, dubbed “The Key 10138,” is the second-largest pear-shaped diamond ever to appear on the public market and came from the world-leading diamond company Diacore, said Sotheby's.
The auction house did not say in its release Friday which cryptocurrencies were used to pay for the diamond, but previously Sotheby's said it would accept bitcoin and ether for what it had estimated would be a sale of $15 million.
“By introducing this innovative payment option to our luxury sale, we open up new possibilities and expand our reach into a whole new clientele, many of whom are from the digitally savvy generation,” said Wenhao Yu, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Jewellery in Asia.
The acceptance of cryptocurrency as a supported payment option is a first for the auction house and the transaction will be processed by Coinbase Commerce.

Auctions Hong Kong Diamond Sotheby’s

Tanzeel Akhtar

Tanzeel Akhtar has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes Africa, Financial Times, The Street, Citywire, Investing.com, Euromoney, Yahoo! Finance, Benzinga, Kitco News, African Business Magazine, Hedge Week, Campden Family Office, Modern Investor, Spear's Wealth Management Magazine, Global Investor, ETF.com, ETF Stream, CIO UK, Funds Global Asia, Portfolio Institutional, Interactive Investor, Bitcoin Magazine, CryptoNews.com, Bitcoin.com, The Local, The Next Web, Mining Journal, Money Marketing, Marketing Week and more. Tanzeel trained as a foreign correspondent at the University of Helsinki, Finland and newspaper journalist at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. She holds a BA (Honours) in English Literature from the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and completed a semester abroad as an ERASMUS student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is NCTJ Qualified - Media Law, Public Administration and passed the Shorthand 100WPM with distinction. She does not currently hold value in any digital currencies or projects.