Key facts:
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Instead of selling their EtherRock for 444 ETH, Rock Dust offered it for 444 wei.
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He did not get to cancel the offer because a bot acted immediately.
We all make mistakes, no one is saved from that. There is also no denying that some mistakes “cost more” than others. Literally, that was learned by a user who sold an Ethereum non-fungible token (NFT) at a significantly lower price than he owed.
The NFT in question was worth $1.2 million. However, its owner received less than a penny on the dollar when he sold it on March 10. The NFT in question was an EtherRock, more precisely number 44. This is part of a collection of digitized rock images that they sell for millions since the middle of last year.
The user himself recounted his experience in a publication from Twitter. His mistake was not related to the amount she assigned to the token, but to the selected unit of measure.
Thus, instead of putting it up for sale for 444 ethers (ETH), that is, USD 1.311.465 According to the CriptoNoticias price index at the closing of this note, he offered it at 444 wei. This is a smaller unit of ether, which is equivalent to one ninth of the cryptocurrency.
Although this person might have voided the offer upon noticing the error, the action of a sniperbot He took away this possibility. These types of bots respond automatically to certain buying and selling opportunities, and are often used in online merchant auctions.
When something is listed at a low price, this program acts instantly and purchases it. That happened in this case. in which the robot made the purchase exactly in the same block. Hence his name, sniperwhich in Spanish means “sniper”.
An error that has been seen before
This is not the first time incidents of this type have been reported. At the end of 2021, CriptoNoticas reported the case from a man who made a similar mistake and sold a 75 ETH ($221,000) NFT for 0.75 ETH (USD 2,200) in the Opensea marketplace.
On that occasion, it was clearly a typing error exploited once more by a bot that was “on the prowl”. To the chagrin of this unlucky (or clueless) user, it was a Bored Ape Yacht Club token, one of the most popular and expensive collections on the market.
If there is something that these two misfortunes teach, it is that you always have to carefully verify the data entered before any type of transaction, be it a purchase, sale, exchange or some other. The block chains They offer many advantages, such as the irreversibility of transactions, but you have to be careful with it, as some people end up learning the hard way.