Arrest warrant for Nelson Mandela sold for $130,000 as an NFT

The NFT is a digitized version of this document issued to Nelson Mandela in 1961. All profits from the digital item will go towards the maintenance of the Liliesleaf Museum, which aims to highlight South African history and its struggle for democratic values.

The auction itself was curated by the London-based online digital art platform Momint. It is also reported that the owner of the NFT is a resident of the UAE. Although he will have full rights to the NFT document, the original will be kept in the museum archives, of which it became a part in the early 2000s. However, the owner of the token will have the right to visit the Liliesleaf Museum and access to the physical version of the document. 

Nelson Mandela continues to be an icon of South African democracy. Mandela was the leader of the opponents of apartheid. In 1962, Mandela was arrested after charges of conspiracy and treason, as a result of which he spent 27 years in prison. In 1993, Nelson Mandela, along with Frederik Willem de Klerk, won the Nobel Peace Prize “for their work to peacefully overthrow the apartheid regime and lay the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.” A year later, Mandela became the first black democratic president of South Africa.

The Liliesleaf Museum itself from 1961 to 1963 was the center of the African National Congress (ANC), in which Mandela and his fellow party members hid from the authorities. Now the museum is one of the main objects of the national heritage of South Africa. Regarding the pandemic, the museum had to suspend its work indefinitely because of the lack of tourists. However, this is not the museum’s first experience with the NFT: a year earlier, Liliesleaf sold a token pistol of anti-apartheid South African politician and revolutionary Oliver Tambo for $50,000.

According to NonFungible, in general, NFT sales over the previous week fell to 100,000 transactions. In comparison, last month this rate equated to 376,000 transactions.