A collector group led by Wintermute co-founder Yoann Turpin bought a 69-million-year-old triceratops skeleton for approximately $5 M. The fossil, measuring over five meters, is one of only 24 complete specimens known. Chaw Wei Yang, who manages the Co-Museum platform, also joined the deal. The specimen will now move from Wyoming to the Le Freeport storage facility in Singapore.
Safes for Whales
Le Freeport, often dubbed "Asia’s Fort Knox," mirrors this market transformation. Jihan Wu, founder of Bitdeer and co-founder of Bitmain, acquired the facility in 2022 for 40 million Singapore dollars.
Built for art and bullion rather than crypto, the high-security vault now sees an influx of industry clients. Le Freeport CEO Lincoln Ng notes that investors are renting vaults for cold wallets and gold worth hundreds of millions. Matrixport, founded by Wu, uses these bunkers to back its tokenized products with physical bullion.
Market Trends
The purchase underscores a shift in elite tastes: the focus has moved from digital collectibles to tangible history. The contrast with the 2021 boom is stark. Back then, entrepreneurs like Vignesh Sundaresan dropped $69 M on a single Beeple NFT. Today, capital flows into antiques, statues, and precious metals.
INSEAD Associate Professor of Finance Ben Charoenwong calls the move logical. The promise of blockchain digitizing all luxury has not fully materialized. For many, crypto is no longer an ideology but a speculative vehicle to acquire traditional stores of value.
Turpin agrees. He likens fossils to Bitcoin: scarcity defined by nature. The key difference is the ability to physically touch the asset — something digital code owners lack.
Data backs the trend toward Real World Assets (RWA). The market cap of Tether’s gold-backed XAUt token has hit $1.6 B. Tether itself holds massive gold stocks outside the banking system as part of its $180 B reserves.
Eccentric spending hasn't vanished; it just turned physical. About a year ago, TRON founder Justin Sun paid $6.2 M for a duct-taped banana. Animoca Brands head Yat Siu bought a 1708 Stradivarius violin for $9 M, later using it as collateral for a Galaxy Digital loan.
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