In yet another awkward NFT story to come out of this year, an NFT that was first bought for $2.9 million, which is Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, received pitifully low offers at an auction attempting to resell it. The offers were “ranging from 0.09 ETH ($277 at current prices) to 0.0019 ETH ($6),” according to CoinDesk, about $277.
The NFT was first purchased by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sina Estavi for that cool $2 million last March. When he first bought it, he predicted, “Years later, people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting.” Just over a year after the purchase, Estavi announced his intention to sell it, predicting it could sell for as much as $50 million, and also pledged to donate half the proceeds to charity.
This hypothetical generous donation quickly dissolved, however. As NFT auctions on sites like OpenSea are all public, the initial offers for the Dorsey Tweet token were far, far below Estavi’s massive asking price. Even as news of the tiny auction prices spread and more bidders threw their hats in, the current highest offer sits at only 3.4 ETH ($10,188.30 at current prices).
This massive space between what this entrepreneur expected to take home and what buyers were really willing to pay illustrates an apparent decline in NFT purchasing that’s also reflected in real data. As TechCrunch has recently reported, “NFT global sales volume hit $4.6 billion in January but declined almost 50% to $2.4 billion by the end of March, according to NFT data aggregator Cryptoslam.”
Estavi’s cryptocurrency ventures do not seem to have a huge success rate. Just months after he purchased the Dorsey tweet, Estavi was arrested in Iran for “disrupting the economic system, by order of the Special Court of Economic Crimes,” which led to the dissolution of his two cryptocurrencies, Bridge Oracle and CryptoLand. He is currently attempting to relaunch Bridge Oracle on a new blockchain.
