Someone bought a loaf of bread with a Bitcoin wallet baked inside

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Yacht parties, longshoremen, McLarens: For the past three years, the eponymous annual Bitcoin conference has taken root in Miami, celebrating the excess of new-rich cryptos while showcasing a unique and particularly masculine strain of financialized tribalism.

While the latest iteration of last month’s lectures featured significantly smaller crowds and less exuberance than previous years, it also appears to have broken new barriers for a new, very different kind of mind-blowing excess. On May 19, pseudonymous concept artist OONA sold a loaf of bread to a collector for 0.5 BTC, or just over $13,400.

The sale was not a trick or gag. The loaf was real perishable country bread. It was actually sold to a man, Vladimir Kravets, who actually paid him thousands of dollars.

In fairness, the bread made in partnership with Bitcoin NFT Market DIBA was different from other grocery store varieties, as it contained a hardware wallet that stored an undisclosed amount of BTC. But neither the artist nor Kravets plan to disclose the amount.

This may be because the real value of “Bit.Bread”, as the article is titled, has nothing to do with the money itself. As with previous work by OONA, it instead investigates the perception of value, especially as this perception relates to gender, an often difficult topic in the male-dominated crypto industry.

It fundamentally studies the ways in which this technology is more progressive than the people who use it, OONA told Decrypt of “Bit.Bread”.

Since 2021, OONA has been creating performance art at crypto conferences, always sporting goggles and a draped mask that conceals her identity. Her work has focused on the treatment and perception of women in crypto, and how cryptoa technology, according to the artist, can financially and politically liberate and empower people of all backgrounds.

At Art Basel Miami last December, OONA, with the help of performance artist Lori Baldwin, auctioned off a cup of her own breast milk live in front of a large audience before being escorted away by security from the conference. The piece, “Milking the Artist,” received a high bid of $200,000.

They’re both part of a progression of performance art activations, as detailed in a recent OONA blog post, including tokenizing and auctioning the butter she had churned. It’s a juxtaposition between the “permanent” and the “perishable”, as she describes it.

Both this piece and “Bit.Bread” riff on the edible symbols of cooking, with the aim of interrogating the value placed on women in crypto-related environments. This value is usually minimal, and often reduced to sexualization and objectification, according to the artist.

OONA (left) alongside an unidentified cast member hired for the show. Image: Alejandra Bernal

Additionally, the degree of crypto-specific sexism that OONA has personally encountered on multiple occasions has generally increased with the crypto price tide and speculative frenzy.

During the 2022 Avalanche Summit, I was asked what my hourly rate was at least five times, because people assumed I was a prostitute, OONA recounted. Going back this year, most conversations were about my performance art.

Same in Bitcoin Miami: Last year, during the final days of the bull market, OONA said she repeatedly had to fight determined men trying to rip off her mask to reveal her face. This year, in the doldrums of the bear market, such an invasion of his artistic and physical privacy has never happened.

In this sense, “Bit.Bread” can be interpreted as a reflection on the relationship between speculation and genre. So far, crypto speculative excesses have generally fostered a hyper-masculine subculture, personified by the crypto bro stereotype.

But that doesn’t mean speculation is itself harmful, according to OONA. On the contrary, speculation is central to the promise of Bitcoins as a tool and value system that will hopefully ultimately uplift people from all walks of life.

I wanted to connect speculation around the value of women to speculation around Bitcoin, she said, adding that both “involve a new set of knowledge, a new way of interacting and a new way of perceiving the self-sovereignty.

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