The NFT community felt the pain of seller maxnaut.eth after he accidentally listed Ape #3,547 for .75 ETH instead of 75 ETH, effectively losing close to $297,000 in the process. Though he realized the mistake instantly, before he could take any action to cancel it, the buyer’s bot sniped the undervalued listing, paying 8 ETH worth of gas to ensure the transaction goes through.
“The industry is so new, bad things are going to happen whether it’s your fault or the tech,” Max told CNET. “Once you no longer have control of the outcome, forget and move on.” He did not whine over the mistake and he got to work—the kind of attitude that’s “gonna make it.”
In August, the owner of Mutant Ape #5275 mistakenly sold it for $17 instead of 17 ETH, a costly mistake of $54,000, which was 99.9% below the floor price of 7.95 ETH. The offer he received was 17 USDC, tricking him to perceive it to be 17 ETH. The new buyer resold it for 5 ETH, making a profit of more than $20,000 in less than three hours.
In November, a seller made an error with CryptoPunk #7557 by listing it for 4.444 ETH instead of 4444 ETH, which got immediately snapped up. He had bought the punk for 59.99 ETH in July. Ouch.
The NFT community believes that OpenSea should have a fail-safe system in place to alert users whenever they try to sell their digital art significantly below the floor price.
Apart from NFT sales, there are some honorable mentions within the crypto space, like BlockFi sending BTC instead of Gemini USD to their customers for a trading promotion. In September, a deposit transaction worth 100,000 USDT was made using a hardware wallet from the main DeversiFi user interface with an erroneously high gas fee of 7676.6 ETH, making it arguably the most expensive transaction in history.
Fortunately, the miner returned the amount to the user even though he was not obliged to do so. The Ethereum blockchain is immutable and there is no transaction reversal by default. But the crypto revolution we are part of is defined by our values. Many crypto users make numerous transactions in a day and these types of mistakes have a good chance of happening. With greater attention and concentration prior to confirming transactions, most of it can be avoided.
