Auction houses have been associated with the blockchain industry for quite some time. For example, the world-renowned Christie's platform has been auctioning NFT tokens since the spring of 2021. By the way, it was there that Mike Winklemann's famous token under the pseudonym Beeple was sold for $69.3 million. The work became the third among the most expensive transactions in the history of art and drew a lot of attention to the industry of unique tokens.

At the same time, Sotheby’s representatives announced the start of engagement with Bitcoin and Etherium in May 2021. They noted that the decision was made amid growing demand for digital assets from collectors. Read more about this topic in a separate piece.

Be that as it may, the latest attempt to auction tokens from the Cryptopunks collection failed. Apparently, their owner did it on purpose – just for fun.

What NFTs are being auctioned off

We’re talking about an auction that Sotheby’s announced back on February 8, 2022. On February 23, they planned to sell a collection of 104 cryptopunks. As the auction house staff noted, they had planned a “historic event”. Here’s a tweet announcing the event.

As it turned out, an anonymous crypto-investor under the pseudonym 0x650d wanted to part with the collection. He also revealed the fact of his cooperation with Sotheby’s on Twitter. By doing so, the collector wanted to create “the biggest NFT deal of all time in the niche”.


Note that Cryptopunks remains one of the most popular NFT collections. As of today, it is the second most expensive unique tokens. The minimum price of the collection's representatives is 65 ethers, which is the equivalent of $156,000.

The lower value of NFT-collections

Accordingly, the auction was supposed to take place tonight. However, minutes before the auction, user 0x650d posted that he had changed his mind. Here’s his rejoinder from Twitter.

Anyway, never mind. I’ll hold.


As a reminder, holding means investing for the long term with no desire to sell the assets. In other words, the investor said that he would not get rid of NFT.

An hour after the post was published, he published a meme. Judging by its content, the investor “wanted to make Cryptopunks more popular by tricking Sotheby’s”.

Dallas Mavericks researcher Haralabos Voulgaris commented on the situation. Here’s his rejoinder, cited by Cointelegraph.

0x650d’s motivation for the last minute decision to abandon the auction may have been a desire to ridicule the high fees charged by Sotheby’s.

In any case, the auction did not take place and the investor attracted a lot of attention to the situation.


We think the situation with the auction is amusing. Obviously, and although the NFT owner had the right to pull off such a thing, his gesture turned out to be quite bizarre. Well, the abandonment of the sale in the last minutes clearly makes it clear that it was a planned action. In any case, auction lovers are left without 104 cryptopunks for now.

What do you think about it? Share your opinion in our millionaire cryptochat. There, we’ll talk about other topics that affect the blockchain and decentralisation industry in one way or another.