A simple typo caused an NFT to be sold for way less than planned.
“Bored Ape” NFT supposedly worth $300,000 was accidentally sold for only $3,000 last Saturday. That’s a whopping $297,000 difference. Ouch!
Before the trader could go back and fix his mistake, a buyer was able to purchase it for the listed price. “How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration, I guess,” the seller, Max, told CNET. “I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly,” he added.
The “Bored Ape” NFT, a nonfungible token digital art piece, is one of 10,000 variations in existence and a hot commodity among NFT and art trading. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 NFTs, each depicting an ape with different traits and visual attributes. It may sound arcane, but it’s one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world. Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone are among its star-studded members.
Right now, the price of entry—which is the cheapest you can buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for—is 52 ether, or $210,000. Wow!
Which is why we empathize with this trader’s pain. To see that he accidentally sold his Bored Ape NFT on Saturday for $3,066 hurt a lot! Unusual trades are often a sign of funny business, as in the case of the person who spent $530 million to buy an NFT from themselves. In Saturday’s case, the cause was a simple, yet so devastating “fat-finger error.” That’s when people make a trade online for the wrong thing, or for the wrong amount.
Here the owner, real name Max or username maxnaut, meant to list his Bored Ape for 75 ether, or around $300,000. Instead he accidentally listed it for 0.75. One hundredth the intended price.
Considering its known value, the NFT was bought instantaneously. The buyer even paid an extra $34,000 to speed up the transaction to ensure no one could snatch it up before them.
The Bored Ape was then promptly listed for $248,000. The transaction appears to have been done by a bot coded to immediately buy NFTs listed below a certain price on behalf of their owners in order to take advantage of these exact situations. These bots are a common instrument in the NFT space.
“I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 eth [$34,000] of gas fees so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that, $250k was gone,” Max told CNET.
“And here within the beauty of the Blockchain you can see that it is both honest and unforgiving,” he added.
Fat finger trades happen sporadically in traditional finance—like the Japanese trader who almost bought 57% of Toyota’s stock in 2014—but most financial institutions will stop those transactions if alerted quickly enough.
Since cryptocurrency and NFTs are designed to be decentralized, you essentially have to rely on the goodwill of the buyer to reverse the transaction.
Fat finger errors in cryptocurrency trades have made many headlines over the past few years. Back in 2019, the company behind Tether, a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar, nearly doubled its own coin supply when it accidentally created $5 billion-worth of new coins. In March, BlockFi meant to send 700 Gemini Dollars to a set of customers, worth roughly $1 each, but mistakenly sent out millions of dollars worth of bitcoin instead. Last November, a company erroneously paid a $24 million fee on a $100,000 transaction.
Similar incidents are increasingly being seen in NFTs, now that many collections have accumulated in market value over the past year. Last month someone tried selling a CryptoPunk NFT for $19 million, but accidentally listed it for $19,000 instead. Back in August, someone fat finger listed their Bored Ape for $26,000, an error that someone else immediately capitalized on. The original owner offered $50,000 to the buyer to return the Bored Ape — but instead the opportunistic buyer sold it for the then-market price of $150,000.
“The industry is so new, bad things are going to happen whether it’s your fault or the tech,” Max said. “Once you no longer have control of the outcome, forget and move on.”
This surely wouldn’t have been easy to say.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club launched back in April, with 10,000 NFTs being sold for 0.08 ether each—about $190 at the time. While NFTs are often associated with individual digital art pieces, collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which allow owners to flaunt their NFTs by using them as profile pictures on social media, are becoming increasingly prevalent.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club has since become the second biggest NFT collection in the world, second only to CryptoPunks, which launched in 2017 and is considered the “original” NFT collection.
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