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gold cube turned up in New York'sCentral Park on Wednesday, guarded by its own security detail. - The promo for artist Niclas Castello's
crypto currency brought reminders of the tungsten cube crypto craze.
For just a few hours, New Yorkers strolling through Central Park on Wednesday were greeted by a baffling sight: a knee-high gold cube with its own security detail.
It turns out it was a 24-karat-gold piece of
Late last year, tungsten cubes started selling like crazy, as crypto fans became almost obsessed with the pleasure of holding them and the cubes' amazing weight-to-size ratio.
Even Jack Dorsey-led Block tapped into the tungsten mania by mentioning the cubes when the digital payments company rebranded from Square in November.
The craze was credited with creating a shortage of tungsten — a high-density industrial metal something like gold — even though a solid 3-inch cube could cost as much as $1,600.
The gold cube in Central Park could be worth a lot more. It weighs 410 pounds, according to its creator Niclas Castello. Gold was trading at around $1,808 an ounce at last check Friday, which would make the block worth more than $11.8 million, if made only of the metal.
While bitcoin is sometimes described as digital gold for its potential as a store of value, this cube is promoting another cryptocurrency: the Castello coin, or $cast.
The coin has no verifiable source of data yet, other than on the artist's website, as it isn't listed by CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, for instance.
The Castello Cube came in a roasting from crypto skeptics on Twitter, where some noted that art publication Arnet reported that its walls were about one-quarter of an inch thick — not solid, as it said in a tweet.