Sculpting Scarcity: Artist Maxfield Mellenbruch Brings Rare Steak Worth Millions To Bitcoin 2025
Sculpting Scarcity: Artist Maxfield Mellenbruch Brings Rare Steak Worth Millions To Bitcoin 2025
Maxfield Mellenbruch an American sculptor, designer, and the creator of the iconic Kialara series returns to the bitcoin stage with Rare, a platinum and gemstone-encrusted sculpture appraised at over $2 million. Mellenbruch first gained recognition in 2014 for crafting cold-storage Bitcoin wallets that blurred the line between high design and cryptographic function, earning a cult following among early adopters and collectors alike. His work explores themes of security, value, and permanence in the digital age.
Now, with Rare, he unveils his most ambitious piece to date. On view exclusively in the Deep Vault VIP exhibition during Bitcoin Conference 2025 in Las Vegas, Rare stands as the centerpiece of this years art auction and is expected to become the highest-selling artwork priced in bitcoin in the conferences history.
Mellenbruch will also appear as a featured speaker on the Genesis Stage in a panel titled From Cave Art to Code: Redefining Value in a World of Absolute Scarcity alongside Vijay Boyapati and Jesse Myers, moderated by Erin Redwing of Inscribing Vegas. The conversation takes place on May 29, 2025, from 3:103:40 PM, just hours before the auction for Rare concludes on Scarce.City.
In advance of the artworks unveiling and auction at Bitcoin 2025, I spoke with Max about the ideas behind Rare and the evolving role of art in a Bitcoin-denominated world.
Rare is a jeweled sculpture of extraordinary commitment over 12,000 gemstones, a 2.56-pound platinum cast, and a design that blends anatomical familiarity, extreme material excess, and almost satirical details like its leather case mimicking butcher paper. What compelled you to make this piece, and how long did it take to conceive, source, and execute such a technically and financially ambitious work?
The whole thing took about a yearcasting the platinum, setting over 12,000 stones by hand, pulling together the right people. From the start, Rare was a stretch: technically, financially, creatively.
The idea had been building for a whiledriven by a growing interest in whats real, what endures, and what nourishes. I started cutting out processed food and paying closer attention to what I was putting in my body. That naturally led me to steaksimple, unprocessed, nutrient-dense. For a couple years, it was at the center of my diet. And the more I leaned into it, the more I noticed how controversial it had become. The narrative around red meat reminded me of how Bitcoin was treated in its early daysdismissed, attacked, misunderstood. But to me, both represented something honest and resilient. Rare came out of that overlap. Not as a dietary message or anything like that, but as a reaction to the way value gets distortedand the instinct to come back to something elemental.
I already knew I had to make it. But seeing peoples reactionsfrom my jewelers excitement to someone at the casting house laughing in disbeliefhelped confirm it. Rare isnt just about excess. Its about curiosityabout taking one idea as far as it can go and seeing if it still holds up.
Writer Jesse Myers suggests that humans are biologically wired to seek out scarce assets a primal instinct that Bitcoin taps into. How did this idea inform your vision for Rare?
Weve always chased whats hard to get. That instinct hasnt changedjust the objects have. Bitcoin taps into it. So does gold. So do gems. With Rare, I wanted to hit that same nerveonly through something physical. Platinum, diamonds, rubiesmaterials that carry weight, both literally and symbolically. Theyre beautiful, elemental, forged over time. We respond to them without needing to be told why.
The title Rare does more than describe it. Its a word people see all the time, but once theyve seen this piece, it sticks differently. It rewires the word. Hijacks it a little. And the next time they see a steakor hear the word rarethis might be the first thing that comes to mind. Thats part of the fun.
And yeah, part of this was about pushing the ceiling higher. If Rare works, it lifts everything that came before it. I think about thathow to keep things moving forward, not just for me, but for the collectors whove believed in my work from the start. Its not about hypeits about making something that holds.
Your sculpture joins a lineage of high-stakes artworks that provoke intense responses Fabergé eggs as imperial excess, Damien Hirsts diamond skull as a meditation on wealth and mortality, Manzonis Artists Shit as market provocation. In the era of Bitcoin as a decentralized store of value, how does Rare challenge our inherited instincts around luxury, permanence, and what it means for something to be truly valuable?
I wanted to create something that felt impossible at first glancea diamond-and-ruby steak. Its absurd, sure. But thats the point. Were surrounded by noise, and attention has become its own kind of currency. I wanted to cut through itnot just to shock, but to say something about what we value. About what lasts. Like the works you mentioned, Rare plays with extravagance not just to impressbut to provoke.
Ive spent the last decade creating physical Bitcoin walletsart that held both currency and trust. I kept my head down, focused on craft, and over time, that turned into a real collector base. Rare isnt a departureits the next step. Just louder. Still speaking the same language: weight, precision, permanence.
I feel like Ive earned the right to go there.
With Rare appraised at over $2 million and debuting at a Bitcoin event, the piece sits at the edge of cultural whiplash a confrontation with both material opulence and Bitcoins trajectory. Do you see it as a kind of future shock especially as figures like Michael Saylor suggest Bitcoin could reach $13 million per bitcoin? Even among Bitcoiners, how prepared do you think people are to emotionally process that scale of value?
Im not even sure what future shock means anymore. Maybe its not about being surprised by the futurebut realizing youre already behind. A lot of people missed Bitcoin early on, and now theyre watching it run. So yeah, $13 million a coin sounds wildbut maybe whats wilder is having none.
Things are moving fasttech, money, cultureand its hard to keep up. People are overwhelmed. Thats where something like Rare fits in. Its physical. You can see it, feel it. In a world where most value is invisible, that matters. Bitcoins differentits digital, but it still forces you to rethink whats real. Same with long-term plays like ETFs. Theyre all just different ways of asking: where do I put my value?
Most people probably arent ready. But no one really is. Were all trying to figure it out while the ground keeps shifting.
Your earlier works, like the Kialara Labyrinth edition in 2015, helped give Bitcoin one of its first tangible forms blending design, function, and cryptographic symbolism into a physical object. With Rare, youve moved from secure vessel to cultural artifact. How does this evolution mirror Bitcoins own transformation from a niche cypherpunk experiment to a globally recognized store of value and institutional or corporate treasury asset?
In the early days, Bitcoin felt invisible. I wanted to give it a physical formsomething fun and engaging people could actually hold. The Kialara series did that. It helped Bitcoin feel real when it was still mostly abstract.
But now Bitcoin is mainstreamETFs, corporate treasuries, global headlines. It doesnt need the same kind of validation. It doesnt need me in the same way. So my role has shifted. With Rare, Im contributing to the culture around it.
At a time when food, value, and meaning are all in flux I wanted to create something that holds that tension. Im not trying to make a nutritional statement, but I get the same feeling from beef and the carnivore movement now that I got from Bitcoin a decade agodisruptive, controversial, misunderstood. Rare felt like the right place to explore that.
As Bitcoin blurs lines between money, ideology, and art, what do you see as the artists role in making sense of this shift especially when the work itself, like Rare, sits at the intersection of extreme material value and symbolic power?
Im not sure if the artists role is to make sense of the shiftor if the shift happens because the artist shows up. Sometimes we reflect the world. Sometimes we bend it. And today, what counts as an artist is wide open. Satoshi didnt make traditional art, but he reshaped how we see trust, time, and value. That feels like art to me.
With Rare, I took some of the Earths most enduring materials and shaped them into something instinctualsomething tied to appetite, ritual, and survival. No electronics. No moving parts. Raw elements from deep underground, shaped into a form we all recognize but rarely stop to consider. A cut of meat, frozen in time. It doesnt try to explain the momentit lets the tension sit there. Still. Silent. But alive.
Thats what art can do. It doesnt hand you meaningit waits for you to find it.
Rare by Max Mellenbruch will be exclusively available for auction during Bitcoin Conference Las Vegas. The sculpture will be on view in the Deep Vault a private exhibition space accessible only to Whale Pass holders. Bidding has started on Scarce.City and concludes May 29th.
Maxs book Kialara, chronicling his early Bitcoin journey and the creation of his meticulously crafted physical wallets, can be found here.
This post Sculpting Scarcity: Artist Maxfield Mellenbruch Brings Rare Steak Worth Millions To Bitcoin 2025 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.
The post Sculpting Scarcity: Artist Maxfield Mellenbruch Brings Rare Steak Worth Millions To Bitcoin 2025 appeared first on BTC Ethereum Crypto Currency Blog.
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