Sina Estavi is a “crypto entrepreneur,” who last year bought a digital token representing Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet. He paid $2.9 million for it, and this month sought to make good on his “investment,” putting it up for auction with an expectation it could net him $48 million. It did not.
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As CoinDesk reports, Estavi put the NFT up for sale on April 9, hoping to get around $50 million for it, and then donate “at least $25 million” of that sum to charity. That’s an ambitious figure for something we can all see, screencap, download, and enjoy below for the cost of just a few seconds of our time:
An auction for the NFT was held, and of the handful of bidders taking part, the highest offer was for…$277. A subsequent offer has since come in for $3,600, but that is still a colossal way off $2.9 million, let alone $48 million. “The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it,” Estavi told CoinDesk.
The timing of the sale is certainly interesting. Estavi was just released from prison in Iran, where had spent nine months after being arrested on charges of “disrupting the economic system.” In that time his cryptocurrency ventures crashed, and his attempts to appease those burned by that collapse are being met with scepticism.
Estavi’s auction also came at a time when NFT sales tracked on Opensea—the single largest marketplace in the space—were down around 50% in 2022, from almost $5 billion in January down to $2.5 billion in March. This decline has sparked moves from “blue chip” NFT owners to search for “alternative uses” for their tokens, which is a fascinating development, in that it implies there was ever a use in the first place.
