With Jack Dorsey Flop, Are NFTs Finally Crashing Down to Earth?

A non-fungible token of the Twitter founder's first tweet recently went on sale for $48 million. The highest bid? $6,200.

Jack Dorsey creator, co-founder, and Chairman of Twitter and co-founder & CEO of Square speaks on stage at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a crypto-currency conference
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Is the modern gold rush over? And by that we mean the mad rush to market, sell and re-sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for seemingly ridiculous amounts.

Per CoinDesk, crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi was trying to offload an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $48 million last week. Estavi had purchased the NFT of the Twitter cofounder’s tweet for $2.8 million in March of 2021.

The highest bid received? By the self-imposed deadline, it was 0.09 Ether (EHT), a cryptocurrency amount that’s the equivalent of $277. And that was even after Estavi promised to give half of the proceeds to charity…which he had estimated would come in around $25 million (oops).

“The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it,” Estavi later told CoinDesk. As of Thursday, the BBC noted the highest bid was up to the equivalent of $6,200.

One user thinks there might be a potential buyer: Elon Musk, who is in the midst of trying to buy Twitter outright.

Last year, InsideHook spoke to Mason Nystrom, a research analyst for Messari, a crypto asset research and intelligence provider, about the value of NFTs.

“If you’re framing it in the sense of it’s a collectible or piece of art, the value is entirely subjective,” Nystrom said. “The analog to comparing that to the traditional art world isn’t very different. The traditional art world is a sport for the wealthy and always has been. To an extent, some NFTs that are high-end pieces of crypto art…the value of that is whatever the buyer is willing to pay.”

In April 2022, the willingness to shell out huge sums for NFTs may be waning.

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