Ethereum NFT Whale loses $150K on a meme gone wrong

by James · July 20, 2022

Ethereum NFT Whale loses 0K on a meme gone wrong

In short

An Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain sold for over $150,000 worth of ETH today in an apparent joke gone wrong.
The buyer, who had previously been a seller, said he forgot to cancel his own “joke” bid of 100 ETH on NFT.

Ethereum name service (ENS) names – actual domain names pointing to crypto wallet addresses – are get value as desirable names are sold as NFTs change hands. But today, a well-known NFT collector is down over $150,000 in ETH after a “joke” bid for an ENS name was actually accepted.

The pseudonymous collector Franklin, who owns 57 valuable Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, had registered the ENS name stop making-fake-bids-it’s-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth using an alternative Ethereum wallet on Tuesday, and today placed a bid of 100 WETH (Wrapped Ethereum) – that’s almost $151,000 right now – on it using his main wallet.

It was meant as a joke, he explained in tweetsto make ENS Bud Twitter bot tweet it out, all while seemingly mocking the same practice. Today, however, Franklin sold that ENS domain to someone else for just 1.9 ETH ($2,880), and tweeted to celebrate to make money.

What sentence or meme would you like me to get one’s bot to tweet out as a .eth address with a 100 WETH bid? Lol, I would have to stamp the ENS address myself too.

— Franklin 🅱️build 57 monkeys (@franklinisbored) 19 July 2022

However, he forgot to cancel the bid of 100 ETH that he had placed from his other wallet. Just 15 minutes after the sale, the new owner of the meme ENS name accepted the offer and received 100 ETH. Franklin got his jokey ENS name back, but is now out 100 ETH on the whole situation.

“Oh no, I lost 100 ETH,” he tweeted. “I celebrated my joke about a domain sale, and shared the spoils, but in a dream of greed, I forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back. This will be the joke of the century. I deserve all the jokes and criticism.”

In response to suspicions from some Twitter users that he was “botted”, or that an automated program accepted his bid of 100 ETH before he could cancel it, he pushed back, claiming it was entirely his own fault.

“I wasn’t ‘botted’. I had plenty of time to cancel my offer, I just ran to Twitter instead,” he wrote. “I also sent the 1.9 WETH back to the person who bought it/returned it to me. This is a mistake that I can’t imagine anyone else putting in the effort to do.”

In a Twitter DM to DecryptFranklin confirmed the chain of events and further commented on what ultimately happened.

“[I] just didn’t think about my outstanding bid,” he said Decrypt. “I didn’t think about canceling or expiring because I had already concluded earlier in the day that I was never going to transfer. But I saw [saw] $$ signs and acted on it.”

Franklin’s tweets about the sale have gone viral this afternoon as commentators from across Crypto Twitter weigh in on the costly apparent misstep.

“You guys have to respect the blockchain as a layer of trust and not go around bidding on things and signing 100 ETH from your wallet,” wrote pseudonymous investor and NFT collector, DCinvestor. “Every time you sign something like that, feel the seriousness of it. I feel bad for Franklin’s loss here, but let it be a lesson to all.”