The Ethereum NFT Whale loses $150,000 on a Meme Gone Wrong

The NFT had a “joke” bid of 100 ETH.
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) names, which are basically domain names that point to crypto wallet addresses, are getting more valuable as people buy and sell desirable names as NFTs. But today, a well-known NFT collector lost over $150,000 worth of ETH because a “joke” bid on an ENS name was accepted.

Franklin, a fake collector who owns 57 valuable Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, registered the ENS name stop-doing-fake-bids-it’s-really-lame-my-guy.eth on Tuesday using a different Ethereum wallet. Today, he placed a 100 WETH (Wrapped Ethereum) bid on it using his main wallet, which is worth about $151,000 right now.

He said in tweets that it was a joke to have the ENS Bids Twitter bot send it out, even though he seemed to be making fun of the same practice. Today, however, Franklin sold that ENS domain to someone else for just under 1.9 ETH ($2,880), and he tweeted about how happy he was to have made money.

What phrase or meme do you want the ens bot to tweet as a.eth address with a 100 WETH bid? I’d have to come up with the ENS address myself, too.

But he forgot to cancel the bid of 100 ETH that he put in from his other wallet. The new owner of the meme ENS name accepted the bid and got the 100 ETH only 15 minutes after the sale. Franklin got back his funny ENS name, but the whole thing cost him 100 ETH.

He wrote on Twitter, “Oh no, I lost 100 ETH.” “I was happy about the sale of my joke domain and sharing the money, but in a greedy dream I forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back. This will be the funniest and worst-handled joke of the century. I deserve all the jokes and criticism that come my way.”

Some Twitter users thought he was “botted,” or that an automatic program accepted his 100 ETH bid before he could cancel it. He pushed back and said it was all his fault.

“I didn’t get ‘botted.’ I had plenty of time to back out of the deal, but instead I ran to Twitter,” he wrote. “I also sent the 1.9 WETH back to the person who sold it to me. This is a mistake that I can’t imagine anyone else making the effort to make.”

In a direct message on Twitter, Franklin confirmed the sequence of events and said more about what happened in the end.

He told Decrypt, “[I] just did not think about my outstanding bid,” he told Decrypt. “I didn’t think about canceling or expiring because I had already concluded earlier in the day that I was never going to transfer. But then I [saw] $$ signs and acted on it.”

This afternoon, Franklin’s tweets about the sale have gone viral as people from all over Crypto Twitter weigh in on what seems to be an expensive mistake.

“Y’all gotta respect the blockchain as a fiduciary layer and not go around making joke bids on stuff, signing 100 ETH from your wallet,” wrote pseudonymous investor and NFT collector, DCinvestor. “Every time you sign something like that, feel the gravity of it. I do feel bad for Franklin’s loss here, but let it be a lesson to everyone.”