NFT Owner’s Typo Costs $297K

It seems the only thing blockchain technology can’t promise is a solution to human error.

The owner of an NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club #3547 got their decimals mixed up on Saturday when they sold the token for 0.75 eth, or 1% of its market value, by mistake. In an attempt to sell the token for 75 eth, or $300,000, the NFT was sold in error to an automated buyer in a call option-like purchase for $3,066, according to CNET.

After the purchase, the buyer dumped ten times the amount paid for the NFT into gas fees to process the transaction instantaneously, a move that prevented any chance of the error being remedied.

“How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess,” the seller of Bored Ape #3547 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.”

Members of the NFT legal community spoke to deBanked about how this type of stuff is all too common and unfortunate, but just comes with the territory of an unregulated financial space.

“It’s a pretty typical problem here in the Wild West,” said Jacob Martin, an attorney specializing in NFTs and author of the NFT Tax Guide. “It’s user error, not platform error. It sucks, but it is what it is.”

The Bored Ape NFT collection is one of the most sought after collections on the blockchain, with entry level tokens being worth about $200,000. While this error may have been able to be fixed in the world of traditional finance, the unforgiving nature of the blockchain world allows errors like this to be cashed in on by opportunistic purchasers.

Back in August, another Bored Ape was accidentally sold for $26,000. When the seller offered the purchaser almost double that to return the NFT, the new purchaser flipped the token to another user for $150,000.

In November, Cryptopunk #7557 which at the time was worth $19 million, was accidentally listed for $19,000. It immediately sold without remedy for the error.

When asked if regulation would help remedy errors like this in the future, some NFT legal gurus were weary about turning to government for solutions to user-committed blockchain errors.

“I don’t think it’s about regulation, it’s about education,” Shekinah Apedo, an attorney who serves as a Compliance SARs Analyst for Bittrex and NFT legal consultant to numerous companies, told deBanked. “The point of decentralization is that there’s no middleman or institution to run to when an error occurs, like one may do with a typo during a bank transaction. Education is necessary and warnings involving risk should be made known.”

“Cigarettes are legal but they are required to have warning labels,” Apedo continued. “Perhaps, regulation involving warning labels or advertising the risks of being your own bank as an NFT and crypto trader or investor would be good for the mainstream public.”