In-demand Bored Ape NFT sold for $3,000 instead of $300,000 due to ‘fat finger’ error

The buyer immediately listed the NFT for $248,000

Bored Ape Yacht Club number 3,547 was supposed to be sold for sale at 75 ethereum, but was sold for 0.75 ETH by accident (OpenSea)

A highly sought-after non-fungible token (NFT) in the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection was accidentally sold for about $3,000 (£2,272) instead of the actual market price of $300,000 (£227,190).

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs – some of which are known to be owned by the likes of Jimmy Fallon and DJ Khaled – consist of digital art of about 10,000 apes that each have different “properties” such as fur type, facial expression, clothing and accessories ranked and valued in terms of their rarity.

The apes are programmatically generated with a computer code mixing and matching their properties to make each of them unique.

A seller, identified by the username maxnaut on their social media handles, hoped to list Bored Ape number 3,547 for sale at 75 ethereum (ETH) on Saturday, but due to a “fat finger” typing error, the user accidentally sold it for about 0.75 ETH, reported CNET.

Before maxnaut could cancel the listing, the NFT was reportedly snapped up by what seemed like a bot account that paid very high “gas” fees of 8 ETH for the Ethereum network to quickly processes the transaction.

The digital art was then immediately listed for $248,000 (£187,810).

“I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 ETH [$34,000 or £25,748] of gas fees so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that, $250k was gone,” maxnaut said.

While in traditional financial markets such types of “fat finger” errors are quickly reversed by facilitating banks if they find the case to be legitimate, there is usually no way of rectifying these kinds of mistakes in crypto markets.

The current floor price of the Bored Ape Yacht Club project – the cost a buyer would pay for an ape with common traits – is about 54 ETH ($204,813 or £155,105).

Steph Curry and Post Malone are some of the other celebrity enthusiasts who own an NFT from the project and have used it as their social media profile photos.

NFTs are anything digital, existing on a similar blockchain technology to bitcoin as a way to prove “ownership” of them and have exploded in popularity recently based on the rise of cryptocurrencies and the desire for digital artists to have more monetisation options for their craft.

Since NFTs are paid for in cryptocurrencies, critics also point that the electricity consumed while minting these virtual currencies is at odds with the environment, with the infrastructure mostly using fossil fuels for mining operations.

“The CO2 emissions, combined with a steady growth of consumption is pushing us towards a climate apocalypse,” French artist Joanie Lemercier pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, explaining why they cancelled their crypto-art release.