Tech pioneer Sun buys NFT for $6m to raise climate awareness

Chinese blockchain entrepreneur Sun Yuchen contributed $6 million to the Open Earth Foundation through buying a crypto art piece, in a bid to raise awareness for global climate change. 

The art piece, titled Ocean Front, is a non-fungible token or NFT created by Beeple, better known as Mike Winkelmann, a pioneering artist in the sphere of NFT artworks.

The NFT is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, such as art, audio and video.

In an open letter, Sun, founder of Tron and CEO of BitTorrent, noted that all the auction proceeds will go to the Open Earth Foundation, the climate accounting and technology project spun out of Yale University, to combat the existential risk of climate change. 

The move is part of broader effort of CarbonDrop, a three-day auction of NFT artworks which raised a total of $6,662,054 from eight artists. It also kicked off a month-long awareness campaign for Open Earth Foundation.

China has vowed it would reach its carbon emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, which has sent a clear message of pushing forward a higher-level open economy.

"This auction is completely nonprofit-making. The ownership of the NFT artwork will be mapped to Tron blockchain following the TRC721 standard, and the art piece will be permanently stored on Tron blockchain and the decentralized storage system BTFS," Sun said.

Sun noted that there is a consensus today that blockchain is not only sweeping the traditional finance industry but also setting the tone for the future world of art.

"It also marks Tron's foray into the NFT space. Soon we are going to establish an NFT foundation, for which we'll hire top-class NFT artists as advisors and work with top-notch arts organizations to register world-level artworks and artists as NFTs on-chain," he added.