Amsterdam street artist becomes crypto millionaire with one big sale
A luxury goods trading platform turned Amsterdam street artist Judith de Leeuw, also known under her artist name JDL, into a crypto millionaire overnight. Idoneus, the Swiss online company, bought four paintings from the 26-year-old for an amount of their cryptocurrency worth 2.9 million dollars, or roughly 2.5 million euros.
De Leeuw sold one massive artwork standing at eight meters tall, and three smaller artworks each about two meters high.
"It's strange. I can't really believe it yet," De Leeuw told NL Times. In the beginning, she ignored the message from the Swiss platform because she thought it was a scam. She enlisted the help of Juul Manders, the owner of football management company 433, to properly research the firm. Only then did she seal the deal with Idoneus.
The street artist often creates her work around social issues and displays it in public areas designed to get people thinking about a particular topic. The street artist tries to convey the emotions of her subjects through artwork. "I try to make the invisible as visible as possible," De Leeuw said.
She said that Idoneus wanted to buy her pieces because they admire her message. "They really loved the character in my work and saw that I do a lot of charity work. They wanted to support me," De Leeuw said.
De Leeuw plans to convert the cryptocurrency into real cash by buying a castle or property in France, renovating it and reselling it. The earnings will also go towards De Leeuw's dream of creating an artwork at the North Pole to draw attention to climate change. "I want to raise awareness for the climate crisis in the most powerful way I can imagine," De Leeuw said.
She also wants to donate around one million of the cryptocurrency to charity to help children in need.
De Leeuw's artwork can be found among other places, in Kuala Lumpur, New York, Paris and in the Wynwood district of Miami. She plans to continue trading in cryptocurrency in the future. "This is only the beginning," the young artist said.