$300,000 Bored Ape NFT by mistake auctioned for just $3,000
This weekend, one unlucky person sold a Bored Ape NFT for $3,000 instead of $300,000 due to a missed decimal point.
According to CNET, the NFT’s owner Max (or maxnaut) put it up for sale on Saturday. For whatever reason, Max intended to price the NFT at 75 ether (about $300,000), but unintentionally wrote 0.75 ether (approximately $3,000). Before they could fix it, the NFT was bought by a bot intended to identify and acquire undervalued listings. On the NFT’s OpenSea page, the drama unfolds.
“How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess,” Max told CNET. “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.”
These so-called “fat-finger errors” are common in banking. In 2015, a young Deutsche Bank employee transferred $6 billion to a hedge fund customer after miscalculating. When the worst happens, traditional markets offer legal or social remedies. As for Deutsche Bank, the hedge fund apparently returned the money the next day.