CryptoPunk NFT Sells For $530M, But There's A Catch

A CryptoPunk NFT was purchased for $530 million on Thursday night, but Crypto Twitter was quick to point out that the sale was far from authentic.

What Happened: CryptoPunk 9998 was supposedly acquired for a record 124,457 Ethereum ETH/USD worth $532,414,977 at the time of the sale.

The transaction was picked up by a CryptoPunk bot that tracks the sales of the algorithmically generated pixelated characters.

While this sale would have undoubtedly gone down in history as the largest NFT sale on record, developers on Twitter identified that the high-value sale was nothing more than a publicity stunt.

The purchase was made by someone who likely knew their way around a smart contract, by a series of flash loan transactions.

“In a nutshell, someone bought this punk from themself with borrowed money and repaid the loan in the same transaction,” explained Larva Labs, the creators of CryptoPunks.

“Some recent large bids were done the same way. The ether is offered and removed in a single transaction. So, while technically briefly valid, the bid can never be accepted. We’ll add filtering to avoid generating notifications for these kinds of transactions in the future.”

According to crypto wallet analytics tool Nansen, if the $530-million CryptoPunk sale was real, it would’ve made CryptoPunks the third-largest crypto asset after Bitcoin BTC/USD and Ethereum, with a market cap of $366 billion.

Photo by Fakurian Design on Unsplash.