Oct 31, 2021
An NFT that sold for half a billion dollars was returned
(Image: Reuters, CryptoPunks)
A $500 Million NFT was recently sold and then returned. Twitter is currently buzzing with rumors of an NFT deal, with the digital asset reportedly changing hands for half a billion dollars.
As you can see, a single account was used to complete the transaction.
NFTs are a hot topic in the cryptocurrency community, with many people obsessing about them.
Celebrities are often involved, which adds to the publicity. However, a simple NFT sale is grabbing the attention of the whole internet community right now.
Why?
When the NFT was sold, it fetched an eye-popping $500 million.
The sale of the NFT was recently made public through Twitter.
An Ethereum-based NFT initiative called CryptoPunks, which began in 2017, uses a Twitter bot to keep tabs on sales. Punk #9998, a non-fungible token (NFT), was sold for 124,457.07 ether (ETH), or a staggering $532.414 million, according to a message from the Twitter bot on Friday.
For obvious reasons, the tweet went viral, with people going crazy about it in the Twitter-town.
A $500 million NFT would have given the digital asset ownership paradigm a massive boost.
As it turned out, many had hoped for something that never came to pass.
As it turned out, the NFT auction was nothing more than a publicity stunt to get people’s attention online.
It’s not as if the transaction never took place. It was more like placing an internet purchase and then returning the items if they don’t work for you in the end.
A short time later, the account that purchased the NFT sold it back and received a complete refund.
Refund of $500 billion
Although this isn’t precisely how things work in the NFT world, it gives you a good idea of what went down.
According to Robert Miller on Twitter, contract A offered the NFT for sale, and contract B purchased it for the stated sum of ether. Contract A immediately returned all of contract B’s ether to contract B.
Something to consider is how contract B came to have so much ether (or money, depending on your perspective) in the first place.
This transaction was funded through a short-term loan taken out by the account holder.
In the cryptocurrency industry, a flash loan is a useful instrument for borrowers to borrow an unsecured loan from a lender.
This loan does not need a third-party middleman since it is managed by a smart contract that cancels it if the borrower does not pay it back.
Contract B paid out its flash loan inside the transaction since contract A instantly returned the whole amount owed to it. There was no ether lost in the process.
No one knows who was behind the viral transaction, although it’s widely thought to have been a single individual.
Regardless, the transaction has once again brought NFTs to the attention of the crypto community, which is a welcome development.
In a previous piece, we defined NFTs and discussed why celebrities from across the globe are getting engaged. To learn all there is to know about NFTs, check out this article.
