How This Whale Lost 100 ETH Through An ENS Domain Name

An ETH whale has incurred a massive loss on account of participating in a meme trend that has been gaining traction on Twitter. The meme trend was in direct connection to the ENS domain names and their growing popularity in the NFT space. Some domain names have been receiving high bids lately, and users in the space have called out the fact that these bids were being placed by the owners of the domain names themselves, leading to this unfortunate situation.

Pumping Up The Price

Following the popularity of the joke that owners were placing high bids on their own domain names using alt accounts, a Twitter user known as @franklinisbored decided to test the ENS bid bot on Twitter which posts about high bids. Franklin is a known Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) whale, holding multiple NFTs from the collection. Hence the reason he was able to make such a gamble on the ENS name.

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He first tweeted asking his more than 110k followers what ENS domain name he should buy. Franklin eventually settled on the “stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth domain name. After this, he listed the domain name for sale and proceeded to use his other account to place a 100 WETH bid on the domain name.

Not too long after, as the ‘joke’ gained traction, Franklin had then received a 1.9 ETH bid on the domain name, which he had accepted. One thing that Franklin had forgotten to do, though, removed the 100 WETH bid he had placed as a joke earlier. As soon as the buyer had received the ENS, they promptly accepted Franklin’s 100 WETH bid and received 97.5 WETH after fees.

ETH price drops to $1,500 | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com

Asking For The ETH Back

After selling the ENS domain name for 1.9 ETH, the BAYC whale proceeded to post a celebratory tweet saying it was “the most surprising 1.891 ETH I have ever made.”  However, not much later, Franklin quickly realized his mistake when he saw the 100 WETH go through. At this point, the celebration quickly turned sour.

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Taking to Twitter once more, Franklin explained his mistake, calling it the “joke and bag fumble of the century.” He explained that this was not a bot sale in any way; rather, it was his fault for not canceling even though he had ample time to do so. 

He proceeded to send the 1.9 WETH back to the buyer of the ENS address, in hopes of the person returning his 100 WETH to him. However, he also accepted that there is little to no chance of him getting his money back.

At the time of this writing, Franklin is yet to update his followers on if the buyer/flipper had sent back his ETH to him. 

Featured image from Coingape, chart from TradingView.com

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