Virtual coup: a hacker stole more than half of the digital version of Klimt’s painting “The Kiss”

The trick? He did not steal the paper painting, but rather its digital version, which the museum promoted as a way to have part of the original to collect.

The painting, one of the most famous paintings in the art world, had entered in the Non Fungible Tokens (NFT) frenzy in 2022, a virtual rage that promised to have unique fragments of digital pieces, which, thanks to a digital certificate that was stored in the blockchain, made it possible to affirm that the user was the true owner of the original.

In January 2022, in the midst of this boom, the Belvedere had put 10,000 ‘The Kiss’ tokens on sale, of which it managed to sell about 2,500 at an average price of about 1,850 euros per unit, billing in total about 4.6 million euros

But since then the digital pieces of ‘The Kiss’ barely attracted new buyers, so about 7,200 units were still on sale.

At the end of last May, a hacker managed to extract those NFTs from the museum’s digital wallet, according to what was reported on the Museum’s blog.

The theoretical damage caused, based on the January 2022 sales price, was around €13.2 million. However, the real price is far from those figures.

In any case, the museum managed to disable the link between the NFTs and the digital images of the painting in time, while the OpenSea platform, where NFTs are bought and sold, also blocked the operations.

The museum is currently working with forensic experts to clarify the theft.

The Belvedere digital innovation project consisted of a high-resolution copy of ‘The Kiss’ divided into 10,000 unique grids linked to an NFT each.

The NFTs of ‘The Kiss’ were presented as “unique”, protected against copying and suitable for sale on the secondary market.

The tokens already sold, in total about 2,800, have not been affected by the theft and can be managed, transferred or traded freely, according to the museum.

However, the NFTs of ‘The Kiss’ are worth much less today than when they went on sale: In 2022 the cheapest cost on average about 0.4 units of the cryptocurrency ether (624 euros) while now the price barely reaches 0.059 ether, that is, 90 euros.