A nonfungible token (NFT) trader appears to have fat-fingered a bid for a free NFT, paying 100 Ether $1,898, presently valued at $191,239, rather than nothing.
The token was part of NFT marketplace OpenSea’s Gemesis NFT collection, which included free NFTs to promote the April 4 launch of OpenSea Pro. The trader’s bid represents a 250% gain above the floor price of 0.04 ETH.
OpenSea Pro is a marketplace aggregator aimed to professional users, offering them “vastly improved” capabilities such as live cross-markets data and sophisticated orders. While others have claimed the transaction was wash trading, Twitter user “0xSun” believes the deal, which took place on the NFT marketplace Blur, occurred because the trader intended to bid $100 but unintentionally bid 100 ETH instead.
A Reddit user who wrote about the sale questioned the wash trading notion, claiming it was an open offer that could be taken up by anybody, making it too dangerous to be a wash trade because another trader or bot would rapidly grab up an offer that high above the floor price.
“I know what you’re thinking, it’s a wash trade, but this was an open offer that could have been accepted by anyone, so it’d be a pretty big risk hoping you were faster than anyone else looking at the offers at the time.”
Wash trading is a type of market manipulation in which a trader buys and sells an item in order to feed the market false information. The tactic is forbidden on regular stock exchanges, but it is highly common in NFT trading.
On April 25, 2022, OpenSea paid an unknown sum for NFT aggregator Gem and enhanced the platform to produce OpenSea Pro. Only users who purchased at least one NFT on Gem before March 31 are eligible to mint a Gemesis NFT, with the minting window closing on May 4.
