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- Azealia Banks and her fiancé Ryder Ripps uploaded an audio sex tape as an NFT. It was sold for $17,000
- Less than 12 hours later it was listed to be resold for over $260 million.
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Rapper Azealia Banks sold her audio sex tape with her fiancé Ryder Ripps for $17,000 as an NFT, or a non-fungible, token, which essentially allows individuals to sell digital objects as one-of-a-kind via cryptocurrency. Now, the sex tape is being resold for over $260 million.
NFTs, as Insider's Grace Kay previously wrote, are "a special class of digital assets that cannot be exchanged with one another for equal value or broken down into smaller values like most currencies." The digital products sold on the cryptocurrency market can range from anything like digital art or virtual real estate to now, the first-ever NFT audio sex tape – Vice reported – which Banks posted.
The audiotape, published on March 6 and titled "I F—-D RYDER RIPPS," is said to be a 24-minute long recording of Banks and her fiancé having sex that was uploaded and listed for 10 Ethereum – a cryptocurrency – valued at over $17,000. Less than 12 hours later, an artist who goes by the name of Rulton Fyder, purchased the tape. According to Fyder's website, he is an anonymous artist "best known for his recontextualisation of other artists' works to capture time and emotion in the NFT art realm," though Fyder's online history only goes back days.
It's unclear if Fyder has any relation to Banks or Ripps.
Once the sale was completed, Fyder was granted "full ownership of the album, as well as distribution and display rights, and sole access to the audio including a WAV file and the only signed LP vinyl record of the sex tape in existence," Vice wrote about the sale.
On Wednesday, Banks uploaded a screenshot of the resale of the NFT on her Instagram account, showing it priced at over $260 million.
"Literally - the most expensive NFT ever," the artist wrote in the caption. "Don't you love how We came, saw, and conquered this s--t in a matter of 48hrs? The f---ing iconnery."
The Harlem-born rapper then posted another image of a Wikipedia page showing the most expensive art purchases of all-time with her audio NFT sex-tape sitting in fourth place.
The image, however, appears to either be edited, or the Wikipedia edit was short-lived. The tape isn't currently on the Wikipedia page, and the actual list is for "highest prices paid," when no one has actually paid the inflated price for the tape yet.
Banks is no stranger to controversy. She's been embroiled in many scandals including most recently when she announced her engagement on social media and wrote "I'm Jewish now." One commenter responded, "It doesn't work like that" and she shot back with a transphobic rant.
She also made headlines after seemingly posting a video of herself digging up her dead cat's remains and seemingly boiling it into a soup. The 29-year-old rapper poked fun at this moment when she posted a screenshot update from the pop culture account on Twitter called Pop Crave to Instagram. In the caption of the screenshot, she wrote "Cat. Soup."
Banks did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.