Niclas Castello/ Sandra Mika
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 art meant to draw attention to a cryptocurrency and an NFT launch — as might be expected, given its echoes of the crypto tungsten cube craze.
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.
