ENS Bidding Joke Goes Wrong, NFT Whale Loses ETH 100

A noted non-fungible token (NFT) collector has lost ETH 100 (USD 148,665) as a result of a "joke" bid on one of his own Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains.

The pseudonymous NFT whale Franklin, who holds a number of valuable Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs (among others), minted the ENS name stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth and put it up for sale using his secondary Ethereum wallet on Tuesday, but also placed a bid of ETH 100 using his main wallet.

Today, he sold that ENS domain to someone else for ETH 1.9 (USD 2,825) and took it to Twitter to celebrate his profit, writing: "Well this is the most surprising 1.891 ETH I have ever made."

While he was busy posting on Twitter, the new owner of the ENS domain accepted the 100 ETH bid Franklin had previously placed -- and sold the domain back to the pseudonymous NFT collector.

"I was celebrating my joke of a domain sale, sharing the spoils, but in a dream of greed, forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back," he said in a Twitter thread, adding that this "will be the joke and bag fumble of the century."

He even rejected suspicions that he was “botted,” meaning an automatic bot accepted the ETH 100 bid before he could cancel it, saying that it was entirely his own mistake.

“I didn’t get ‘botted.’ I had plenty of time to cancel my offer, I just ran to Twitter instead,” he wrote. “I also sent the 1.9 WETH back to the person who bought/flipped it back to me. This is a mistake that I can’t imagine anyone else putting in the effort to make.”

While Crypto Twitter is weighing in on the costly mistake, pseudonymous investor and NFT collector DCinvestor noted that there is one lesson learned from this incident: don't make joke bids on stuff.

DCinvestor tweeted,

“Y’all gotta respect the blockchain as a fiduciary layer and not go around making joke bids on stuff, signing 100 ETH from your wallet.” 

The collector added that, “Every time you sign something like that, feel the gravity of it. I do feel bad for Franklin’s loss here, but let it be a lesson to everyone.”