No, the NFT token from the Cryptopunks series didn’t buy for $543 million. And here’s why
The CryptoPunks series of unique tokens has become a true symbol of the hype surrounding NFT this year. Many of the items in the collection are selling for more than a million dollars, and the minimum price of a CryptoPunks does not drop below hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, the day before, a particularly large deal was spotted on the blockchain with CryptoPunk token #9998 – it was allegedly sold for 124,457 ETH or $543 million at today’s exchange rate. But there’s a catch to this story, which requires a deep dive into the intricacies of working with NFT.
As is traditional, let’s start with an explanation. We’re talking about cryptopunk number 9998, which looks like this.
Cryptopunk #9998
The day before, it was traded for 124 thousand ether, which is the largest sale of such a token in the history of cryptocurrencies. On the punk page, this deal looks like this.
Allegedly the most expensive purchase of an NFT token
However, it’s not all that simple here. From the looks of it, the deal could still be considered null and void. At the very least there was no real buyer for this “punk”.
The most expensive NFT-token
To recap, the biggest deal in the series is considered to be the purchase of CryptoPunk #7523 at Sotheby’s auction for $11.8 million. The biggest NFT deal overall is the sale of a work called EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS by artist Beeple at Christie’s auction.
CryptoPunk #9998 broke both records by a huge margin of hundreds of millions of dollars and immediately caught the attention of the cryptocommunity. The token transaction appeared on the Etherium blockchain and was tagged with the CryptoPunks Bot Twitter account. It automatically monitors large ‘cryptopunks’ transactions. After a little research, it turns out that the information it posted about CryptoPunk #9998 has to do with instant loans of funds in DeFi-protocols.
CryptoPunk #9998.
The official Twitter account of Larva Labs, the studio that developed CryptoPunks, brought more clarity to what happened. Here’s his quote on the matter.
In short, someone bought this punk with borrowed funds from DeFi-protocol and repaid the loan in the same transaction. Some recent big NFT sale bids have been made in the same way. Ether is offered for trade and removed from the block in a single transaction. That is, the very offer to sell the token has been made, but it cannot, in fact, be satisfied.
In other words, one address put the token up for sale and another address borrowed a huge amount of money and “bought” NFT. Almost at the same moment the coins from the seller’s address came back to pay for the loan, Decrypt reports. But why would it do such a thing?
Most likely, it’s the work of an anonymous crypto-enthusiast who, with a large sum of money, is simply drawing attention to himself and wants to sell NFT for a higher price. When you decrypt the transaction information in the Etherscan blockchain browser, you can see the message “looks rare’ – blurr n’ arr00” in the input field.
The message in the transaction
Note, the phrase "looks rare" means "seems rare". It's a meme from the cryptocurrency NFT community, with which fans of unique tokens seem to endorse various NFTs. And more often than not, this is said to refer to useless instances that will hardly sell.
As an example of such a thing, we recently found an NFT on the OpenSea platform called “How to earn 100 ETH by selling pictures”. The set price in this case is 100 ether, which means essentially the author is hoping that some over-wealthy investor will appreciate the joke and share some of the capital with him. That said, it seems to us that the cost of creating this NFT may not pay off.
NFT token for 100 ethers
Funnily enough, technically the sale of the token did count – and for the already mentioned 124,457 ethers for the equivalent of $543 million. However, as can be understood from further developments with NFT, the token ended up going back to where it originally was. This can be seen from the transactions in the list below.
Dear NFT token returned to its owner
Meanwhile, Larva Labs has promised that they will add a filter to their bots for similar transactions that just confuse the cryptocurrency community. NFT records remain unbroken.
We've clarified the current data: the record for NFT token sales still belongs to cryptocurrencies. Excluding the latest token sale, the winners are punks #3100 and #7804. They were bought for 4,200 ethers.
Most expensive NFT token sales
We think the current situation with NFT tokens has turned out to be amusing. It once again showed that the presence of anonymity in the cryptocurrency network can mislead investors. At the very least, nothing prevents collectors from "transacting" their NFTs from different addresses and creating the appearance of success for the token in question. So art connoisseurs should clearly be careful - although there is indeed great value in "punks" given their popularity and role in the cryptocurrency community.
You can find out more about such tokens in our Millionaire Crypto Chat. There we will discuss other important news affecting the blockchain and decentralization industry.
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