A robot with a heart of stone – A bug on OpenSea had allowed users of the platform at the end of January 2022 to buy for a pittance, non-fungible tokens (NFT) normally worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to the detriment of sellers victims of the flaw. Another NFT owner has just experienced the same type of mishap, but OpenSea is no longer involved. The culprits would rather be a robot, and a simple error … human.
An NFT worth more than a million dollars sold almost for free: who should we throw the stone at?
March 10, 2022 was a black day for the twitto @dino_dealer. The latter was the owner of EtherRock 44, an NFT whose value is valued at $1.2 million. He unfortunately sold it for only 444 wei, or $0.0012, instead of 444 ether (ETH)a simple unit error that ultimately cost him a fortune.
A sniper bot enabled the “lucky” buyer to seize this opportunity. Sniper bots are robots used most often on auction sites like eBay. They collect information on the auctions and will bid at the last second, thus removing any possibility of reaction to competitors.
These sniper bots are now widely used on non-fungible token listing sites. On the Upwork freelancing platform, offers for sniping tools for the OpenSea NFT marketplace start at $200.
But back to the DinoDealer misadventure. The immutability of the blockchain which is one of the main advantages of this technology, unfortunately penalizes in this kind of situation, users who make an error by mistake.
Stone heart
DinoDealer is aware of the irreversibility of his action, unless he has found an honest buyer who would agree to return his EtherRock for 444 wei – which is obviously unlikely. He still joked on Twitter asking for “crypto customer service” to see if he could “ make a cancellation request “.
DinoDealer later shared a capture of responses from the crypto community, or rather people who are likely scammers, recommending the services of others who would be able to help him fix this error.
DinoDealer will always be able to console themselves – or not – telling himself that he is far from being the only one to have made this type of error. In December 2021, an owner of Bored Ape Yacht Club had also sold his NFT at a derisory price because of a simple comma error.
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