San Francisco: In a bizarre incident, a seller lost a moolah when he accidentally listed the price of his non-fungible token (NFT) as $3,000 (0.75 Ethereum) then the original price of $300,000 (75 Ethereum) on an NFT trading platform. The artwork was immediately snapped up for $3,000 before he could correct the price.
The ‘Bored App Yacht Club’ NFT was bought instantaneously by a bot on the trading platform.
“The buyer paid an extra $34,000 to speed up the transaction, ensuring no one could buy it up before him. The Bored Ape was then promptly listed for $248,000,” according to a report in CNET.
The ‘Bored Ape Yacht Club’ is one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world.
“How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess. I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly. 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,” its seller who goes by the name of Max was quoted as saying in the report on Monday.
Such “fat-finger errors” are well-known in the world of traditional finance.
In 2015, a junior Deutsche Bank employee accidentally sent $6 billion to a hedge fund client after messing up their calculations.
A Japanese trader had almost bought 57 per cent of Toyota’s stock in 2014.
Last month a cryptocurrency company erroneously paid a $24 million fee on a $100,000 transaction.
For Max, there’s no way to get his cash back. It doesn’t help that the NFT he sold belongs to a particularly valuable collection, the report mentioned.
“Once you no longer have control of the outcome, forget and move on,” he said.