Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet as an NFT for $2.9 million last year. He listed the NFT for sale again at $48 million last week.
Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi is struggling to sell an NFT of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet after having shelled out millions to buy the token in the first place.Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey sold the first tweet ever as a non-fungible token (NFT) last year amid much fanfare. The tweet, which fetched $2.9 million, has had a grim future though.
Yesterday, Sina Estavi, the Iranian crypto entrepreneur who bought the tweet last year, put it up for an auction. Estavi expected that the tweet would appreciate in value to $25 million and was going to donate half the sale amount to charity. The tweet, however, got only seven bids from buyers, with the highest being of $280 (0.09 ETH). There was even a bid for $6.
Dorsey himself may have expected a pretty high value as well, as he commented on Estavi’s own tweet announcing the auction, urging the entrepreneur to donate 99% of the proceeds to charity. At the time of writing, OpenSea showed the highest bid at 2.2 ETH, which amounts to around $6000.
- A crypto entrepreneur is stuck with his $3 million NFT purchase of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.
- He listed the NFT for sale at a price of $48 million, but the highest bid he’s received so far is about $6,800.
- “Someone like Elon Musk” deserves to own the NFT, he told the BBC.
He auctioned the NFT of the tweet for a whopping $48 million, according to CoinDesk. As of Thursday morning, the highest bid he received was 2.2 ether, or about $6,856.
That’s just 2% of the $2.9 million that Estavi paid when he bought the NFT in March.
“I think years later people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting,” he said then.
A year later, his prediction isn’t exactly playing out. After listing the token on NFT marketplace OpenSea, Estavi has found the highest bids are nothing even close to the amount he paid, much less to the amount he wanted for it.
He told CoinDesk and the BBC that although the deadline he set was over, he might either accept a “good offer” or may never sell it.
“I think the value of this NFT is far greater than you can imagine and whoever wants to buy it must be worth,” he told the BBC.
“I think someone like Elon Musk could deserve this NFT.”
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique certificates that prove ownership of digital assets like trading cards, music, images, or even tweets like Dorsey’s. Total NFT sales volume has ballooned to $25 billion over the past year as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs seek to capitalize on the seemingly-prosperous Web3 space.
Some experts say the rush to capitalize off the NFT boom has come at the expense of user security, with hacks rampant across marketplaces.
Although Estavi owns the digital right to Dorsey’s tweet, it is still publicly accessible to anyone who can use the internet.
Estavi, the founder of two Malaysia-based crypto companies, claimed in a tweet last week that he planned to donate 50% of the proceeds to poverty relief efforts in Africa.
To be sure, the drop in the sale value may also be related to Estavi’s own background. The Malaysia-based entrepreneur has had two failed ventures in the past year, especially after he was arrested by Iranian authorities in May last year, for allegedly disrupting the country’s economy.
It’s possible that the crypto community simply didn’t want to associate with him, given that his crypto exchange, CryptoLand, tanked with customers unable to access their money, as did the BRG token attached to the Bridge Oracle project that he ran.