NFT Heist: Lurking for 14 Days, 10E Flips Black Monkey for 60x Profit
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NFT Heist: Lurking for 14 Days, 10E Flips Black Monkey for 60x Profit
The once-thriving traces of innovation ultimately become historical bad debts and hidden time bombs.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
In the early hours of today, Beijing time, CryptoPunk #2386 changed hands on-chain.
Surprisingly, the transaction price for this sale of CryptoPunk #2386 was merely 10 ETH. Even in today's extremely sluggish NFT market, this figure remains astonishing.
At the time of writing, the floor price of the CryptoPunks collection remains as high as 30.45 ETH. Moreover, CryptoPunk #2386 belongs to the rarest "ape" variant within the series. With top holders generally reluctant to sell, Punks of this caliber have long been effectively off-market — there are only 24 ape Punks across the entire CryptoPunks collection, second only to the nine alien Punks.
Back in 2022, when the NFT market was still booming, CryptoPunk #2386 received a massive offer of 1800 ETH. Just hours after this recent transfer, market bids for CryptoPunk #2386 quickly rose to 600 ETH — meaning its mysterious buyer could immediately resell and turn 10 ETH into 600 ETH, achieving a 60-fold profit.
Clearly, this morning’s transaction was abnormal, with NFT industry insiders already calling it a "heist." So how exactly did this strange trade occur? Ethereum ecosystem developer Quit has provided a detailed explanation.
Several years ago, improving liquidity for NFTs was a major startup trend. At that time, a protocol called Niftex offered NFT fractionalization, splitting specific NFTs into multiple fungible ERC-20 tokens (referred to below as "shards") to enhance their liquidity.
On September 26, 2020, CryptoPunk #2386 was fractionalized on Niftex at an estimated valuation of around 450 ETH. The NFT was divided into 10,000 shards, which entered the market and are now held by 257 users.
Times have changed. As the NFT sector cooled down, Niftex announced shutdown, but its smart contracts remained active, leaving the original CryptoPunk #2386 still locked inside the Niftex contract.
Niftex's contract provided several paths for repurchasing the original NFT: the first and most straightforward being gathering all the shards and redeeming the original from the contract — however, given the highly fragmented ownership of the shards, this method is practically unfeasible. The second path allowed users to submit a “forced buyout” bid; if no other shard holder objected during a 14-day bidding period, the bidder could acquire the NFT at their proposed price.
On August 28, an address starting with 0x282 submitted a "forced buyout" bid via the Niftex contract at 0.001 ETH per shard (totaling 10 ETH).
Perhaps due to Niftex being defunct, most shard holders failed to notice this bid. However, Quit pointed out that at least two shard holders did become aware of the activity… One holder, possibly assuming there was still ample time, took no action; while another holder — @gmoneyNFT — actively attempted to object.
According to Niftex’s contract rules, to oppose a "forced buyout," one must place a counter-bid at a higher price per shard than the original bidder. Since 0x282’s offer was 0.001 ETH per shard, any valid objection required a minimum price of 0.0010000001 ETH per shard.
However, gmoneyNFT’s counter-offer was only 0.000001 ETH per shard, which did not exceed 0x282’s original bid, rendering the objection invalid.
During the subsequent 14-day objection window, no user placed a counter-bid exceeding 0.0010000001 ETH per shard, so 0x282’s forced buyout successfully went through. Ultimately, 0x282 acquired the ultra-rare CryptoPunk #2386 for just 10 ETH — a price more than 70% lower than the current CryptoPunks floor price.
So far, no one has successfully traced the true identity behind 0x282, nor is it known whether this user will accept the current market offers, which have already reached 600 ETH and may continue rising. The story continues.
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