Coinbase
- An NFT investor said he jokingly offered to sell an Ethereum crypto wallet address for $150,000.
- He sold it for $2,900 but forgot to cancel his offer, allowing the buyer to sell it back for the original amount.
- "This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century," he said. "I deserve all of the jokes and criticism."
A big-time NFT investor who owns 57 digital art pieces from the Bored Ape Yacht Club said he lost $150,000 via a joke bid.
Investor Franklin Caldwell, whose Twitter handle is @franklinisbored, said he lost the 100 ETH by jokingly bidding on a so-called Ethereum Name System (ENS) domain, which is basically a crypto wallet address in readable form that is minted as an NFT.
He appeared to be mocking how some users do this often, creating phony domains with fake bids so that a Twitter bot called EnsBidBot would tweet about the offer.
—Franklin 🅱️uilding 57 apes (@franklinisbored) July 19, 2022
ENS domains are the crypto world's way of translating complex wallet addresses so that we can read them more easily — the addresses typically are 42 characters long and begin with "0x." It's a little like how traditional websites use the Domain Name System, or DNS, to turn regular .com domain names in your browser into IP addresses that help computers find a website.
If you've seen people like comedian Jimmy Fallon and actor Anthony Hopkins with a ".eth" at the end of their Twitter profile names, that is likely their domain name for their ETH crypto addresses.
According to Molly White — who keeps the world tuned into cautionary crypto tales with her blog "Web3 is going just great" — Caldwell created an ENS domain called stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth and placed a 100 ETH bid on it.
He thought he'd had the last laugh when someone offered him 1.9 ETH, or about $2,900, for something that amounted to a joke. Caldwell accepted before realizing the person was able to turn around and make off with his 100 ETH since he'd forgotten to cancel that offer.
The person pocketed the money and sold the domain name back to Caldwell, who took to Twitter shortly after to lament his mistake.
"Oh no, I lost 100 ETH," he posted on Wednesday. "I was celebrating my joke of a domain sale, sharing the spoils, but in a dream of greed, forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back. This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century. I deserve all of the jokes and criticism."
He also said he'd refunded the 1.9 ETH back to the person, hoping that they would return the entire offer, to no avail. The seller, who goes by @8892OS on Twitter, tweeted in response, "i ripped this guy off for 100 eth and he just sent me another 1.9?"
Caldwell did not immediately respond to Insider's request for an interview.