Imagine paying $2.9 million for one of the best-known NFTs—a representation of Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet—and finding people aren’t offering $48 million to buy it, as you expected. Instead, you’re faced with an offer of $6,231. For Sina Estavi, this unfortunate scenario is a reality.
Indian-born Estavi bought the Non-Fungible Token of Dorsey’s tweet, the first one to be sent via the service back in 2006, with a winning bid of $2,915,835.47 in March last year.
Estavi announced his intention to sell the NFT last week, pledging to give 50% of the sale, which he believed would exceed $25 million, to charity. It was put up for auction on OpenSea for $48 million, ready for the multi-million-dollar bids to come rolling in.
An auction for the NFT was held, and of the handful of bidders taking part, the highest offer was for…$277. A subsequent offer has since come in for $3,600, but that is still a colossal way off $2.9 million, let alone $48 million. A few more offers have come in since the auction closed, but the highest is currently $6,231.80, several digits short of what Estavi paid for the NFT.
“The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it,” Estavi said.
The timing of the sale is coming at a time when Estavi was just released from prison in Iran, where had spent nine months after being arrested on charges of “disrupting the economic system.” In that time his cryptocurrency ventures crashed, and his attempts to appease those burned by that collapse are being met with scepticism.