On Wednesday, during a much-anticipated auction at Sotheby’s, the seller of a collection of 104 CryptoPunks, which was supposed to sell for up to $30 million, reversed his position.
The lot, dubbed “Punk It!” by Sotheby’s, was initially purchased by collector “0x650d” in July 2021 for $7 million in a single transaction.
The seller was initially very excited about the sale, as posted in the tweet from early February.
However, the anonymous collector stated in another tweet that they had changed their minds.
Is the NFT collection undervalued? Why the change of mind?
Rumors of a lukewarm reception for the CryptoPunks mega-lot may have contributed to 0x650d’s reversal. According to three sources, including one on-site bidder at Sotheby’s, the highest pre-bid offer was $14 million, which was also the reserve price.
Moreover, there have been some phishing scams that have plagued the NFT space, including the recent legal lawsuit against Opensea, where a user’s Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was reportedly stolen and then resold for a large sum of money.
As user “0x650d” has decided to “hodl”, it could be that the individual wants the value to go higher before making the decision to sell his valuable assets.
CryptoPunks, which was founded by Larva Labs in 2017, has produced over 683,000 ETH in sales volume, which is nearly $2 billion at the time of publication. The current floor price for the project is 67.5 ETH ($207,000).
This would have been Sotheby’s second big NFT sale, with the first being a $24.4 million collection of 101 Bored Apes sold in September, at the New York auction house, where rapper Ja Rule was among those in attendance.
To say Sotheby’s has only participated in the burgeoning realm of digital art and crypto is an understatement – the renowned auction house reported over $100 million in NFT sales in 2021 alone, and has even taken non-NFT related artwork bids in ETH, the Ethereum blockchain’s native currency.