Sina Estavi attracted international attention last March when she bought a non-perishable testimony from the first tweet. He paid nearly $ 3 million for NFT, kept it for more than a year, and then put it up for sale on a popular NFT auction site earlier this month.
Estavi began bidding on OpenSea for $ 48 million, but after nine days, no bids have reached even a fraction of that figure. The highest bid on Friday was 4.2 Ethers, or about $ 12,600.
The failure of the auction is a sign that the NFT market is starting to cool, a blockchain expert told CBS MoneyWatch.
Estavi said on Twitter that he wanted to donate the proceeds from his sale of NFT to a charity. Now, given the poor results of the auction, Estavi is unsure of his next move. Estavi did not respond to requests for comment from CBS News.
“My sale offer was high and not everyone could afford it,” Estavi told Reuters on Thursday, when the highest bid was worth $ 280. “It’s important to me who wants to buy it, I won’t sell this NFT to anyone because I don’t think everyone deserves this NFT.”
I decided to sell this NFT (the first tweet in the world) and donate 50% of the revenue ($ 25 million or more) to charity. @GiveDirectly
⁇
⁇ pic.twitter.com/yiaZjJt1p0– Estavi (@sinaEstavi) April 6, 2022
The semi-criminal
Estavi is a Middle Eastern-based cryptocurrency investor and CEO of the blockchain company Bridge Oracle. Prior to Bridge Oracle, Estavi created a cryptocurrency exchange platform called CryptoLand that secured funding from several early investors. Estavi was arrested in Iran last year on charges of “disrupting the economic system” and forced to shut down CryptoLand, according to Iranian authorities.
Estavi was released from custody on the day his NFT auction closed, CoinDesk reported.
Estavi’s arrest certainly played a role in the auction results, said Merav Ozair, a blockchain expert and professor of financial technology at Rutger University. Some people in the crypto world see Estavi as a semi-criminal because he is now looking for money to pay CryptoLand investors, Ozair said.
An NFT provides someone with proof of ownership of a unique code linked to a piece of digital art, a digital coupon, or perhaps a video clip, something a buyer may not have on hand. NFTs can be transferred or sold, but not copied or split into smaller parts.
Another reason Estavi’s NFT didn’t get high bids is because the tweet itself is still on Twitter, Ozair said. Former CEO Jack Dorsey, who took office in 2006, is the only one who can remove him. While tweeting is still active, Estavi’s NFT does not have the rarity value it needs to get a high price, Ozair said.
“Jack Dorsey is not being transparent enough about what rights he waives in the tweet,” he said.
A refrigeration market
NFTs have been around since 2014, but their popularity has skyrocketed in the last two years, marked by some mind-boggling purchases. Beeple artist Mike Winkelmann sold an NFT for $ 69 million last June. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden sold an NFT for about $ 5.4 million last April.
Demand and hype surrounding NFTs has begun to cool in recent months, Ozair said, in part because cryptography enthusiasts have turned their attention to metavers.
Sales data support the history of a declining market. NFT sales totaled about $ 25 billion worldwide in 2021, a big drop from the 2020 figure of $ 95 billion, according to sales tracker DappRadar. OpenSea, one of the largest NFT markets in the world, reported that the number of NFT sales on the platform peaked in August 2021 and then began to decline at the end of the year.
The first half of 2022 also shows signs of weaker demand. The average selling price of an NFT was about $ 1,000 in mid-April, below $ 6,800 at the beginning of the year, according to NonFungible data.
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