21st March 2022 > > EtherRocks.

tl;dr

An EtherRock sells for less than 1c, and the seller is somewhat upset.

Market Snap (at time of writing)

Market Wrap

Leveraged shorts getting slightly out of whack, which is positive for holders like us.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – EtherRock non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

You may already be familiar with the NFT phenomenon known as EtherRocks.

These seemingly simple graphical representations of a rock have become bewilderingly popular since being launched in 2017, a date that undoubtedly gives them some panache as a very early entrant into the NFT market.

As an example, last August this EtherRock sold for 400 ETH, about $1.3mm at the time:

(Note that the BTC laser eyes have been added for the Twitter post. I could spend time finding an unadulterated version, but frankly I am not sure that will aid our understanding any more than this picture).

Scarcity also plays its part – there are only 100 EtherRocks in existence, which gives rise to a certain degree of illiquidity in the secondary market.

Regardless of your personal feelings – be they of enthusiasm or antipathy – towards EtherRocks, they remain as valuable as the amount someone is willing to pay for one.

…

If one was lucky enough to have bought one of these in the very early days, one would be feeling mightily pleased with the $1mm or so windfall that could be heading your way.

Unfortunately for one chap, hoping to cash in his windfall, he made a terribly upsetting mistake.

He listed this rock for sale:

Hoping to move it on at a price of 444 ETH, approximately $1.2mm, he listed it for 444 Wei.

1 ETH = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Wei or 10 to the power of 18. Your calculator probably doesn’t account for such tiny numbers but let me assure the listing price was much less than 1c.

Ouch.

To make matters a little worse, a sniping bot bought this rock within the same block that it was listed, and it has subsequently been sold for 234 ETH, over $600k.

…

There was nothing illegal about this chain of events – a sniping bot built specifically to identify mis-priced rocks has done its job. Unless the owner of the bot wanted to return the rock instead of selling it on cheaply, there is no way that this transaction can be reversed or rectified in any way.

This is a salutary reminder that you must always be careful and vigilant in all things crypto.