Written by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
In the early hours of this morning Beijing time, CryptoPunk numbered#2386completed a turnover on the chain.
Surprisingly, the transaction price of CryptoPunk#2386was only 10 ETH, which is still an incredible number even in today's extremely bleak NFT market.
As of writing, the floor price of the CryptoPunks series is still as high as 30.45 ETH, not to mention that CryptoPunk#2386is the rarest "Ape" model in the series. With top holders generally reluctant to sell, CryptoPunks of this level have almost always been out of stock - there are only 24 monkeys in the entire CryptoPunks series, second only to the "Alien" model, which has only 9.
When NFT was still hot in 2022, CryptoPunk#2386received a huge offer of 1,800 ETH. Just a few hours after this transaction, the market offer for CryptoPunk#2386also quickly rose to 600 ETH - this means that its mysterious buyer only needs to change hands immediately to exchange 10 ETH for 600 ETH, making a profit of up to 60 times.
Obviously, this morning's turnover was an abnormal transaction, and people in the NFT industry have even called it a "big robbery." So, how was this strange transaction completed? Ethereum ecosystem developer Quit gave a more detailed explanation.
A few years ago, attempts to improve the liquidity of NFTs were still a major entrepreneurial hotspot in the industry. At that time, there was an NFT fragmentation protocol called Niftex on the market, which could split a specific NFT into multiple homogeneous ERC-20 tokens (hereinafter referred to as "fragments") to improve the liquidity of the NFT itself.
On September 26, 2020, CryptoPunk#2386completed fragmentation on Niftex with a valuation of approximately 450 ETH. The NFT was divided into 10,000 "fragments". After these "fragments" flowed into the market, they are now held by 257 users.
As time goes by and the NFT market cools down, Niftex has announced its suspension of operations, but its contract has remained in existence and the main body of CryptoPunk#2386has been hosted in Niftex’s smart contract.
For the repurchase of NFT entities, Niftex's contract has designed multiple paths: the first is the most conventional path, that is, you can collect all the "fragments" that are split out, and then redeem the entity from the contract - considering the dispersed holding of "fragments", this path is actually difficult to operate; the second is that you can make a "forced purchase" offer to the contract. If no other "fragment" holders object within the 14-day quotation cycle, you can purchase the NFT at the corresponding offer.
On August 28, the address starting with 0x282 made a "forced purchase" offer to the Niftex contract at a price of 0.001 ETH per fragment (i.e. a total price of 10 ETH).
Perhaps because Niftex has ceased operations, the vast majority of "fragment" holders did not notice the existence of this offer, but Quit pointed out that in fact at least two "fragment" holders noticed this development... One of the "fragment" holders may not have taken any action because there was still plenty of time, while the other "fragment" holder (@gmoneyNFT) actually took action to oppose it.
According to the contract rules of Niftex, if you want to object to other people's "forced purchase", you must buy the "fragments" in the hands of the other party at a price higher than the bidder. Since 0x282's bid is 0.001 ETH per fragment, the effective objection price must be at least 0.0010000001 ETH.
However, the objection price proposed by gmoneyNFT was only 0.000001 ETH per fragment, which did not exceed the original offer of 0x282, so its objection was unsuccessful.
In the following 14-day quotation cycle, no user made an opposing bid higher than 0.0010000001 ETH, so 0x282's "forced purchase" passed smoothly. In the end, 0x282 purchased the extremely rare CryptoPunk#2386at a cost of 10 ETH, which was even 70% lower than the floor price of the CryptoPunks series.
At present, no one has successfully traced the true identity of 0x282, and it is not certain whether the user would agree to the market quotation that has reached 600 ETH and is expected to continue to rise. The story is still ongoing.
