An extremely rare original copy of the US constitution on Thursday sold for US$43.2 million — a world record for a historical document at auction — with a cryptocurrency consortium that coveted the text outbid by another investor.
Sotheby’s auction house, which staged the sale, said the item was one of only 13 known surviving copies of the US charter, signed on Sept. 17, 1787, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia by the US’ founders, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison.
The winning bidder was not immediately identified.
Photo: AFP
A group of cryptocurrency investors raised US$40 million in ethereum from more than 17,000 contributors to try to buy the document, but failed to secure the prize, the consortium said.
“We didn’t get the constitution, but we made history nonetheless,” ConstitutionDAO wrote on Twitter.
“We broke the record for the largest crowdfund for a physical object and most money crowdfunded in 72h, which will of course be refunded to everyone who participated,” it added.
A Sotheby’s spokesman said the sale was a world record for a historical document offered at auction.
Selby Kiffer, a manuscripts and ancient books expert at Sotheby’s, said in September that this copy was probably part of an edition of 500 printed the day before the signing, and likely came off the printing presses on the evening of Sept. 16, 1787.
The text, with its celebrated opening of “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” went on to be ratified by individual states, starting with Delaware in December 1787 and ending with Rhode Island in May 1790.
The original copy sold on Thursday — one of just two still in private hands, in this case the US collector Dorothy Tapper Goldman — was estimated last September at from US$15 million to US$20 million.
In the end it went for more than twice that sum, and in just eight minutes as bidders in the New York auction room, and also on the telephone from around the globe, upped their offers.
Groups such as ConstitutionDAO — the last three letters of its name standing for “decentralized autonomous organization” — have begun forming loose coalitions to raise funds to bid on expensive collectibles, including one group that pulled together US$4 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album that had previously been owned by jailed hedge fund founder Martin Shkreli.
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