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It’s been a couple of years since NFTs managed to take the world by storm despite the many critics and skeptics who failed to understand the appeal of shelling out a laughable amount of money for the digital ownership rights for popular memes, JPEGs of cartoon monkeys, and other supposedly valuable assets.
There were signs that the NFT bubble was poised to burst just as quickly as it had formed at the start of 2021, and it was pretty evident that was indeed the case by the time the summer rolled around that year.
Nowadays, the NFT market primarily serves as an incredible source of schadenfreude for the people who correctly predicted it was not, in fact, The Next Big Thing and derive some pleasure from knowing the many celebrities who played a role in shilling the projects that contributed to the initial hysteria saw the value of their investment crater.
At the end of the day, it’s pretty hard to feel bad for anyone who was foolish enough to drop money they could’ve spent to purchase a mansion and a fleet of cars to “own” something that anyone with access to the internet can take a screenshot of.
That includes crypto evangelist Sina Estavi, who shelled out a whopping $2.9 million for an NFT linked to the message Twitter founder Jack Dorsey posted in 2006 that marked the first tweet ever sent on the social media platform.
In 2022, Estavi attempted to recoup some of that sum in an unsuccessful auction where the top bid was a whopping $280 (around 0.000965% of what he initially paid) as opposed to the $48 million he was hoping for.
According to International Business Times, the NFT hasn’t exactly bounced back since then, as former Securities and Exchange Commission official John Reed Stark took a bit of a victory lap after discovering someone had recently bid a grand total of $1.14 in an attempt to get Estavi to transfer ownership.
While the outlet asserts the market value on OpenSea (the marketplace where the bulk of NFTs change hands) is a paltry $3.77, that’s not necessarily an accurate assessment of the demand, and other bidders have since entered the fray (as of this writing, the top offer is around $1,000).
However, it’s safe to assume it’s never going to sniff what Estavi paid in the first place.