The St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum will start trading in NFTs

Leonardo da Vinci: Madonna Litta (1490)

St. Petersburg (Russia) – The St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum is starting to trade in digital art. In collaboration with the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, it will offer buyers increasingly popular unique tokens (NFTs) inspired by works from its collections. The public sale began today and will last until September 7, as reported by AFP from one of the largest and most famous museums in the world.

NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is an electronic key that is unique and thus cannot be exchanged for something else. It is a digital work with a certificate of authenticity, which theoretically cannot be stolen. In recent years, their popularity among collectors has surged, with some NFTs being sold at auctions for several million dollars. They can either be digitally created works or digitized versions of real artworks. They can be gifted or traded, but they cannot be altered or duplicated.

The Hermitage will offer for sale in NFT form the painting Madonna Litta by Leonardo da Vinci from 1490, Judith by Giorgione from 1504, The Lilac Bush by Vincent van Gogh from 1889, The Garden at Montgeron from 1876 by Claude Monet, or Composition VI by Wassily Kandinsky. To ensure that their "tokenized" versions are true unique items, they will bear the signature of the director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, the museum emphasized.

The price of each digital batch starts at 10,000 BUSD, which is a cryptocurrency that tracks the US dollar exchange rate. The Binance NFT platform brings together artists and collectors to trade the most sought-after NFTs.

The St. Petersburg Hermitage was founded in 1764 and is the largest museum in the world in terms of exhibited exhibits. In its approximately 1000 halls, more than 60,000 artworks can be viewed, and there are about three million more in its depots.