OpenSea collector fat fingers a 100 ETH bid for a free NFT

Some pundits have argued the trader mistakenly put up a bid for 100 Ether that was quickly snapped up, while others believe the sale was a wash trade.

A nonfungible token (NFT) trader has seemingly fat-fingered a bid for a free NFT, buying it for 100 Ether (ETH), currently valued at $191,239, instead of nothing.

The token was part of NFT marketplace OpenSea’s Gemesis NFT collection — free NFTs intended to commemorate the launch of OpenSea Pro on April 4. The trader’s bid is a 250,000% increase on the floor price of 0.04 ETH.

OpenSea Pro is a marketplace aggregator tailored to professional users by providing them with what OpenSea calls “a vastly improved” suite of features such as live cross-marketplace data and advanced orders.

While some have argued the sale was wash trading, Twitter user “0xSun” believed the sale — which took place on the NFT marketplace Blur — occurred because the trader wanted to bid $100 but accidentally bid 100 ETH instead.

Yeah someone else put the 100ETH bid by mistake (He probably want to bid 100 as amount) and it got accepted by another one with 1500+ gwei gas

— 0xSun (@0xSunNFT) April 5, 2023

A Reddit user who posted about the sale also cast doubt on the wash trading theory, arguing it was an open offer that was available to anyone, making it too risky to be a wash trade as another trader or bot would quickly snap up an offer so far above the floor price.

“I know what you guys are thinking it was a wash trade but this was an open offer that could have been accepted by anybody, so it would be a pretty big risk hoping you were faster than anybody else looking at the offers at that moment.”

Wash trading is a form of market manipulation in which a trader buys and sells an asset to feed misleading information to the market. The practice is illegal in traditional stock markets but is very prevalent in NFT trading.

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OpenSea acquired NFT aggregator Gem for an undisclosed amount on April 25, 2022, and refined the platform in order to create OpenSea Pro.

Only users who bought at least one NFT on Gem prior to March 31 are eligible to mint a Gemesis NFT, with the minting window set to close on May 4.

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