What would you do if you sell your NFT for a hundredth of its market price? Probably you wouldn’t be very happy. Well, this happened to one unlucky guy.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 pieces of digital NFT art living on the ethereum (eth) blockchain. On Saturday, the owner of such a piece of art accidentally sold his NFT for a fraction of what it was worth.
How the mistake that made the NFT market “happy” occurred
The trader, identified only as Max or “maxnaut” online, told tech news website CNET that he meant to list his NFT for 75 ether, or about $284,495. But a “lapse of concentration” caused him to accidentally type in 0.75 ether as the listing price.
And this misfortune is called the fat finger. A fat-finger error is where a trader places the wrong bet on a stock or other financial asset because of a typing mistake. In 2014, for example, a fat-finger mistake was blamed for a sudden spike in the share price of British lender HSBC.
He said that the NFT was instantly bought by an automated account, which later resold the piece for 59.99 eth ($227,558).
“I saw the error as my finger clicked confirm, but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 eth of gas fees so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel. I have no animosity to the botter, it’s just part of the game,” he said for CNN.
To add insult to injury, the buyer using the bot even paid an extra $34,000 in “gas fees” — which are required for making transactions on Ethereum — to make sure they got it first.