Typos can sometimes prove to be costly. They can cost you a lot of money. Recently, a Bored Ape NFT of value $300,000 was sold for $3000 due to a typo – a decimal point was wrongly placed.
CNET reported that the owner of the NFT was – Max. Max, also known as Maxnaut, labels himself as a solo traveler, owner of a marketing agency and an NFT investor. Max put the NFT for sale on Saturday. While listing the price of the NFT, instead of typing the price as 75 ETH, which would have amounted to $300,000, he typed 0.75 ETH. This amounted to just $3000. Before he could make a correction, the NFT had been picked up by a bot specifically programmed to scan for and purchase listings that were undervalued.
What caused the error?
Max told CNET that the typo occurred due to a lapse in concentration. Max added that he listed several items daily and a momentary lapse of concentration caused the typo. He immediately noticed the error, but before he made a correction, a bot sent 8 ETH of gas fees for the NFT, leading to a loss of $250,000.
Such errors, known as ‘fat-finger errors’ are not rare in the financial world. A junior Deutsche Bank employee, in 2015, had mistakenly transferred $6 billion to a hedge fund client. The traditional markets usually have some corrective mechanism in place, and Deutsche Bank got its money back.
However, Max cannot get his money back. The bored ape NFT that he sold is part of a valuable collection. There are only 10,000 bored apes that exist. Each of them, through a combination of qualities, creates a gamer avatar. The value of the NFT, more than its aesthetic value, depends on its perceived value. Bored ape NFTs are owned by celebrities such as Steph Curry and Jimmy Fallon and are considered an exclusive collection. The value of this NFT was low initially but is now valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Max, however, was taking the loss well. He tweeted to say that one should not dwell too long thinking about the error and one should just move on.
