A French Street Artist Made $1,000 After Adding a Bitcoin QR Code to His Murals

A French Street Artist Made $1,000 After Adding a Bitcoin QR Code to His Murals

artnet News | Sarah Cascone

Even if you don’t quite understand cryptocurrencies, you’ve probably heard that Bitcoin and its many siblings are the way of the future. Now, one artist has come up with a new way to benefit directly from this still-nascent technology by inviting passersby to donate to him using a Bitcoin QR code, which he affixed to his murals. The brainchild behind the idea is French street artist Pascal “PBOY” Boyart, and the artist’s embrace of the digital currency is already paying dividends. As of this writing, Boyar has made 0.11 Bitcoin (about $1,000) from 23 donors thanks to his clever embrace of cryptocurrency. The feat has even caught the attention of Reddit.

Boyart was intrigued by the idea of being able to connect directly with the public and to receive money for his work without going through a middleman. So, he took six months off from painting to learn about this new technology. The donation process that resulted is decidedly simple: Anyone with a smartphone and a Bitcoin wallet can scan the QR code on the mural and make a digital payment that goes directly to the artist. “I think that the times we are living are difficult for free-minded artists,” the artist told artnet News in an email. “It looks like the Impressionist era, with an official art of academic artists and the others that you have not much chance to see in an international art fair.”…read more

Image: Pascal “PBOY” Boyart, Rembrandt dos au mur, a mural in Paris featuring a QR code that allows the public to donate to the artist using Bitcoin. Photo courtesy of the artist.