NFT auction of Twitter’s first tweet flops spectacularly
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A crypto entrepreneur who purchased an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet a year ago for $2.9 million is looking to resale it. Here is all you need to know
As NFTs and digital collectibles gained mainstream attention last year, everyone started looking for how they could be a part of these developments. The concept of immutable ownership excited many, and more so, it linked to the steady rise of the metaverse.
This led to over $17 billion traded in non-fungible tokens last year, and the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, garnered over $13.3 billion in valuation, with several NFT collections, like those from Yuga Labs, soared in value.
Jack Dorsey listed his first tweet on Twitter for sale with a similar intent to ride on this momentum. Despite the exciting year, the NFT market experienced last year, the tweet sold for $2.9 million. The eventual buyer was a Malaysian-based crypto entrepreneur named Sina Estavi.
After an auction on an online platform called Valuables, owned by US-based Company Cent, the sale was finalized. As proof of ownership, Mr. Estavi received a digitally signed and verified certificate by Jack Dorsey. This transfer included the metadata of the original tweet, such as the time Jack Dorsey shared the tweet.
The second sale: Finding a $48 million buyer
Mr. Estavi put up the NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for resale last week for $48 million, and he had earlier claimed to receive an offer for $10 million for the tweet. He also announced in a tweet that half of the sale price, which he assumed would amount to around $25 million, would go to charity.
Mr. Estavi had often referred to the tweet as the Mona Lisa of digital assets and, logically, expected that the valuation would be much more than he got it. However, not many share the same optimism.
The maximum bid the NFT has received so far was valued at $6,222.36 on Thursday. This is a massive jump from the earlier end-of-auction bid of $280 but still far short of the asking price of $48 million in ETH.
Mr. Estavi has been reported saying that he “may never sell” the tweet unless he received a “high bid” without stating what would qualify as a high bid.
Is the NFT market losing its worth?
While NFT trading volumes have crashed in 2022, coupled with growing concerns about scams, there are still a lot of transactions going on within the space. Just last month, over $2.4 billion worth of NFTs were traded on OpenSea. Compared to OpenSea’s trading volume of $96 million last April, this shows how well the space has grown over the previous year.
Mr. Estavi, however, remains optimistic. “Years later, people will realize the value of this NFT,” he said, “Keep that in mind.” In a growing NFT world, that’s a statement that could come to fruition considering that an asset is worth what people are willing to pay for it. It is just a matter of convincing the right buyer to key into it.
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