Sotheby’s VP Michael Bouhanna Implicated In Insider Trading Scheme
Michael Bouhanna claimed his memecoin is "a personal hobby." Bouhanna and Sotheby's client Harold Eytan orchestrated an insider trading scheme with a crypto token inspired by Maurizio Cattelan's work.
Who is Michael Bouhanna?
Michael Bouhanna is a Sotheby’s Vice President and serves as Head of Digital Art and NFTs. In 2021, he spearheaded Sotheby’s foray into digital art during the explosive growth of non-fungible token based artwork.
Bouhanna helped to engineer the $24 million sale of 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs in September 2021. At the time, Sotheby’s fabricated and advanced a narrative that the Bored Ape auction winner was a “traditional collector” of art. Bouhanna described the sale as a “great indicator of the level of confidence in this amazing NFT project.”
In 2023, Surfing the Waves reported that the actual winner was now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Sotheby’s claimed in a legal filing that “FTX was not the winning bidder of the BAYC NFT auction.”
Currently, Bouhanna is promoting Sotheby’s upcoming auction of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian. Cattelan originally debuted the conceptual artwork in 2019 and was sold as an edition of three. Comedian is known as a banana affixed to a white wall with duct tape, but the work itself consists of a certificate of authenticity and detailed instructions on how the banana should be displayed.
Today, November 20th, Sotheby’s will auction off another edition of Comedian. The auction winner will receive a certificate which “grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan.”
The auction house estimates that this certificate will sell for more than $1 million.
In October 2024, while promoting Sotheby’s upcoming Comedian auction, Bouhanna stealthily launched a cryptocurrency memecoin on Solana that he titled “Comedian.” He used the token to facilitate an insider trading scheme.
What insider trading occurred?
On October 24th, Sotheby’s announced a world tour of Cattelan’s Comedian, culminating in the auction.
The day following Sotheby’s announcement, Bouhanna created and launched a memecoin called “Comedian.” Per Bouhanna, he believed he was doing so anonymously at the time. But just a few hours after launch, his identity was connected to the token deployer wallet.
Under the cash tag $BAN, the token’s social pages use imagery of Cattelan’s Comedian. The pump.fun launch page provides this description: “The most significant meme of the art history by Mauricio Cattelan. Being auction at Sotheby’s November 20th 🍌.”
Less than one hour after launching the Comedian memecoin, Bouhanna promoted Sotheby’s auction of Comedian with a post on X, calling it “the most significant work of the 21st century.”
On October 27th, Lookonchain posted a thread on X claiming that Bouhanna had struggled to profit from trading memecoins and therefore decided to launch the Comedian memecoin. The thread claimed that Bouhanna “made more than $1M on $BAN with just one insider wallet!”
The alleged insider wallet purchased nearly 4% of the tokens at a price of 10.2 Solana (about $1,800). Less than one hour after Bouhanna posted his promotion of Sotheby’s Comedian, the insider wallet allegedly belonging to Bouhanna began taking profits. The wallet owner continued to take profits in chunks of several thousand dollars over the next two days, netting roughly $150,000 while still holding a significant reserve of BAN.
Shortly after the Lookonchain insider allegations gained public notice, the wallet in question stopped selling BAN holdings altogether. It had not moved any BAN since October 27th — until the day before Sotheby’s auction.
What happened with the insider wallet on the day before Sotheby’s auction?
As of November 18th, the insider wallet held over $2,700,000 million worth of Bouhanna’s token.
On November 19th, the wallet owner transferred about $2.2 million worth of BAN through a chain of wallets. Some of those wallets ended up sending large chunks of their BAN holdings to centralized exchange accounts.
This is often regarded as an intent to sell or convert to fiat currency.
How did Michael Bouhanna respond to the accusations?
Neither Sotheby’s or Bouhanna responded to requests for comment from Surfing the Waves. However, Bouhanna did publicly address the allegations from Lookonchain regarding his own alleged insider trading.
On October 28th, Cryptonews published an article about the situation with a comment from Bouhanna calling the allegations “false and defamatory.”
Yet, six days later, Bouhanna confirmed via X that he is the deployer of the BAN token. He defended it as a “spontaneous project and a personal hobby completely unrelated to my role at Sotheby’s.”
Bouhanna explained that he wanted to launch the token anonymously as a “satirical critique” inspired by “the conceptual questioning of value in Comedian.”
Bouhanna confessed that he shared the pump.fun link to BAN with a group of friends at the token launch, arguing that this explains “why there are some wallet connections between [his friends] and the [BAN] creator’s wallet.”
Overall, Bouhanna confirmed Lookonchain’s report – with one important caveat. He claims that he does not own the insider wallet in question.
Although Lookonchain’s thread identified a common funding source between Bouhanna’s wallet and the insider wallet, Bouhanna claims that this wallet is actually owned by a friend.1
Yet, even if Bouhanna is telling the truth about this particular wallet, it would not exonerate him. He effectively admitted to facilitating insider trades for his friends – trades made possible by his employment with Sotheby’s.
Bouhanna provided an insider tip to a group of his friends. His reputation and relationship with Sotheby’s clients stood to benefit from providing this insider tip.
We also do not know if Bouhanna traded, purchased, or transferred BAN from additional wallets he owned. A common practice for insider memecoin schemes is to purchase and sell the token from a wallet unconnected to the token deployer wallet.
There are several other wallets which have relationships with the BAN deployer which were not referenced in Lookonchain’s thread. Bouhanna has not explained his relationship with any of these additional insider wallets.
Bouhanna did not respond to requests from Surfing the Waves attempting to clarify his personal trading history with his own token.
Further insider trading occurred amongst a different pair of wallets which purchased about 14% of the token supply shortly after Bouhanna launched BAN. This wallet cluster profited a six-figure amount via the scheme and likely stands to profit a great deal further.
Both of these wallets likely belong to Sotheby’s client Harold Eytan.
Who is Harold Eytan? How is he involved?
Harold Eytan appears to be one of the apparent beneficiaries of Bouhanna’s insider scheme.
Eytan is CEO of Particle, a company described as a “fractional ownership fine art company,” as well as Reach, a social finance protocol “that rewards users for community engagement.” Eytan is a client of Sotheby’s and has a personal relationship with Bouhanna.
About 40 minutes after Bouhanna launched BAN – but before Bouhanna posted on X about the Sotheby’s auction – one of the Eytan wallets purchased about $1200 worth of BAN. Less than 30 minutes following Bouhanna’s X post promoting the auction, Eytan’s wallet began selling BAN at a considerable multiple.
Soon after Bouhanna posted to X about Comedian, Eytan quoted the post with the comment: “What goes higher the original art or its pump.fun shitcoin [derivative]?”
One user responded: “it wont pump unless you sell all your 9% token. Ppl aren’t idiots.”
Eytan replied with a “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. He continued to sell BAN in clips over the next few days.
In between selling off BAN in clips, Eytan also launched his own memecoin called “$othebys.” Using Sotheby’s branding, the $othebys X account promoted BAN and made comments defending Bouhanna. Eytan’s coin launched after the LookOnChain allegations.
The $othebys X account bio reads: “Caring about art, but mostly about money. Est. 1744. The auction house for comedians.”
Eytan’s token bonded to Raydium in less than two minutes. It soared past a one million dollar market cap and then quickly collapsed. The associated X account has not posted since November 3rd.
About two hours after Eytan launched his Sotheby’s-branded token, Bouhanna posted on X: “Free the Art.” Some users perceived this as an endorsement of Eytan’s token, while others perceived it as an attempt to rally BAN.
Eytan could not be reached by Surfing the Waves to offer clarification of his involvement with BAN.
Did Bouhanna promote his BAN token?
As part of his attempt to “clear the air,” Bouhanna stated: “I did not promote BAN or encourage anyone to buy it.”
Yet, evidence contradicts this claim. Bouhanna provided the token launch link to a personal group chat before promoting BAN with his “most significant work of the 21st century” remark. Furthermore, he also liked a post directly encouraging people to purchase BAN.
A few hours after BAN launched, user 宝石 on X quoted Bouhanna’s post praising Comedian. 宝石 commented “buy the dip” with the contract address for BAN.
According to 宝石, Bouhanna liked his post.
It seems improbable that this user fabricated the screenshot since this post was published before Bouhanna was widely identified as the BAN deployer. If the screenshot is authentic, then Bouhanna very explicitly encouraged people to purchase the token.
Another X user by the name “Lana Yang” also claimed on November 20th that Bouhanna liked her previous video post promoting BAN.2
“Do you want to know which memecoin is about to skyrocket?” asked Yang in the first video, posted on November 18th. “Hint: it’s got a banana, a billionaire, and Sotheby’s all in the mix. Yup — we’re talking about BAN coin.”
In the second video, she provided evidence with an X screenshot showing a Michael Bouhanna account liking her post, alongside another screenshot of Bouhanna’s profile.
“Michael Bouhanna, the VP of Sotheby’s, just liked my post” said Yang in her follow-up video. “This auction is huge for BAN coin’s visibility and could send this coin to the moon.”
Is BAN related to Bouhanna’s role as Sotheby’s VP? Is BAN affiliated with Sotheby’s?
In his position as vice president, Bouhanna has privileged access to nonpublic information relating to Sotheby’s business. Bouhanna likely has access to marketing plans for Comedian. Not only that, but he can literally create and publish marketing promotion at will using his social media profile — as he did when he publicly described Comedian as “the most significant work of the 21st century.”
Bouhanna leveraged relationships and advantages intertwined with his employment at Sotheby’s to inflate the market cap of a coin that he himself created. His suggestion that BAN is “completely unrelated to my role at Sotheby’s” and that “Sotheby’s has no affiliation whatsoever with the token” is purely wishful thinking.
BAN token’s DEX Screener page states: “The project issuer is the president of Sotheby's auction house.”
This description appeals to a sense of legitimacy due to its connection with Sotheby’s — a connection which would not exist without Bouhanna’s involvement.
BAN is directly affiliated with Sotheby’s precisely because Bouhanna exploited his role at Sotheby’s to benefit both himself and Eytan, a Sotheby’s client.
“This is ‘I didn’t know the gun would fire when you pull the trigger’ fake ignorance crap,” wrote art collector and attorney Artie Handz in a quote of Bouhanna’s post.
Handz continued on the Verse Talks podcast, criticizing Bouhanna’s statement: “As a lawyer, if this was put on the stand in front of me, I would tear this up. It’s poor excuses at best, in my opinion. He did make the coin. … He claims he did not promote BAN or encourage anyone to buy it, but in the same text talks about how he sent it to his friends.”
How did Sotheby’s benefit from this scheme?
The auction house now stands to gain from the additional hype and attention generated by the scandal and BAN’s buzz.
In my opinion, when it comes to controversial artworks, all publicity can be good publicity. Despite the negative public reaction when Bouhanna’s self-dealing activities were exposed, the scandal still spread further awareness and increased discussion and view counts related to Sotheby’s auction.
Sotheby’s effectively received a free marketing campaign for their auction. Images of Cattelan’s work saturated social media from a mixture of bots and Chinese crypto influencers promoting BAN and the broader crypto community discussing Bouhanna’s controversial involvement with the coin.
In this way, I believe Sotheby’s directly benefited from their employee’s wire fraud activities.
BAN cracked a $200 million market cap on November 17th and hurdled past a $300 million market cap the next day. In turn, this generated more attention and continues to drive more eyeballs to the spectacle of Sotheby’s Comedian auction.
In the same vein, BAN’s insider buyers stand to benefit from Sotheby’s ongoing market campaign for the Comedian auction, as well as the inevitable press generated by the sale.
Did Bouhanna not realize that he would be caught?
Bouhanna seemed to believe that his identity was concealed when launching the BAN token and did not realize his wallet was easily traceable.
He had previously posted his wallet address on Twitter in an attempt to win a crypto giveaway. This address was the same address as the BAN deployer.
Although he deleted his post, several people captured screenshots to preserve evidence that he was the owner of the BAN deployer wallet. If they did not capture evidence leaving Bouhanna red-handed, it is possible that he never would have admitted to launching BAN.
Who else was involved with BAN?
One of the remarkable elements of BAN’s launch was the immediate artificial activity on social media. In the initial days of its launch, many of the posts on X came from Chinese spam bot accounts. The Telegram was also locked and filled with bots.
These are often signals that a team is coordinating behind the scenes to inflate social metrics in an attempt to attract attention and trading volume. If there is a team which supported the launch of BAN, it would seem to counter Bouhanna’s claim that BAN was a “spontaneous project.” This type of coordination would require prior planning.
I do not have any evidence which proves that anyone hired a professional team to support the launch of BAN. However, the circumstances strongly suggest that someone was coordinating artificial social media activity to support BAN around token launch.
One last eyebrow-raising detail: on October 26th (the day after launching BAN), Bouhanna announced that he would be a featured speaker at Binance Blockchain Week.
Binance published an interview with Bouhanna on November 14th. Before the interview, there was a ramp up in BAN trading volume and a considerable spike after it was published.
Four days later, Binance listed BAN on its futures market.
At the time of publication, BAN hovers around a $250 million market cap.
Lookonchain’s reasoning for why the insider wallet belongs to Bouhanna appears to rely on its source of funding. One way to determine the identity of a crypto wallet is to identify the owner of the wallet which supplied the initial funds. While analyzing source funding does frequently help you to identify the wallet owner, it is not always a surefire method. For example, the original funding to his wallet could have been provided by a friend. This seems to be what Bouhanna is suggesting.
Her name is included in quotes here because her social media profiles are connected under several different aliases, including: Lana Yang, Lana Young, Bitcoin_girl, and Crypto Tomi.
Great summary! Do you know about the artwork they plagiarized from the Banana Tape Wall community? $BTW was on Solana 3 months prior so $BAN used the artwork. They also tried to buy $BTW out bc of the threat this incumbent imposes but the offer was rejected.