Bored Ape Yacht Club: Someone Accidentally Sold a $ 300,000 NFT for $ 3,000

the Bored Monkey Yacht Club is one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world. You may laugh at the words “prestigious” and “NFT” used so closely together, but its star members include Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone. Right now, the price of entry – which is the cheapest you can buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for – is 52 ethers, or $ 210,000.

This is why it is so painful to see that someone accidentally sold their Bored Ape NFT on Saturday for $ 3,066.

Unusual transactions are often a sign of a fun business, as in the case of the person who spent $ 530 million to buy an NFT of themselves. In Saturday’s case, the cause was a simple and devastating “fat finger error”. This is when people trade online for the wrong thing or for the wrong amount. Here the owner, real name Max or his username maxnaut, wanted to list his Bored Ape for 75 ethers, or around $ 300,000, but accidentally listed it for 0.75. One hundredth of the expected price.

It was bought instantly. The buyer paid an additional $ 34,000 to expedite the transaction, ensuring that no one could enter it before him. The Bored Ape was then quickly listed for $ 248,000. The transaction appears to have been carried out by a bot, which can be coded to immediately purchase NFTs listed below a certain price on behalf of their owners in order to take advantage of these exact situations.

” How did it happen ? Lack of focus, I guess, ”Max told me. “I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly. I instantly saw the error when my finger clicked the mouse, but a bot sent a transaction with more than 8 eth [$34,000] gas charge, so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that, $ 250,000 was gone. “

Big finger trades happen sporadically in mainstream finance – like the Japanese trader who almost bought 57% of Toyota’s stock in 2014 – but most financial institutions will stop these deals if alerted quickly enough. Since cryptocurrency and NFTs are designed to be decentralized, you basically have to rely on the buyer’s goodwill to cancel the transaction.

Big finger mistakes in cryptocurrency transactions have grabbed the headlines for the past few years. In 2019, the company behind Tether, a cryptocurrency linked to the US dollar, nearly doubled its own coin supply when it accidentally created $ 5 billion in new coins. In March, BlockFi planned to send $ 700 Gemini to a set of customers, worth around $ 1 each, but mistakenly sent millions of dollars worth of bitcoin instead. Last month, a company mistakenly paid $ 24 million in fees on a $ 100,000 transaction.

Similar incidents are increasingly seen in NFTs, now that many collections have accumulated in market value over the past year. Last month, someone tried to sell an NFT CryptoPunk for $ 19 million, but accidentally listed it for $ 19,000 instead. In August, someone with a big finger listed their Bored Ape at $ 26,000, a mistake someone else immediately capitalized on. The original owner offered the buyer $ 50,000 to return the bored monkey, but the opportunistic buyer sold it for $ 150,000 then on the market.

“The industry is so new that bad things are going to happen, whether it’s your fault or the technology,” Max said. “Once you are no longer in control of the outcome, forget about it and move on.”