Billionaire Jack Dorsey the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, decided to switch up the game by selling his first-ever Twitter thread as a form of NFT art. He sold it to Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi in 2021 for $2.9 Million – but Estavi’s efforts to resell it have run aground.
Drama alert! If you haven’t seen this story going around about Jack Dorsey, best believe it – it’s crazy. So sit back and grab your shades; it’s time to dive into this NFT (non-fungible token). In summary, the man who bought an NFT of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet is trying to sell it.
He purchased it for $2.9 million, but the resale auction initially closed with a top bid of just $280 – ouch. Now his story has gone viral.
While you could argue that Dorsey’s first-tweet NFT has historical significance, the price tag is nearly impossible to justify. According to Tech Story, “the bubble price Estavi paid epitomises the more significant‘ fool theory’ at work.”
Jack Dorsey’s debut NFT was an image of the first-ever tweet posted on Twitter, which he founded in 2006. The tweet reads: “Just setting up my twttr,” sent from Mr Dorsey’s account. In March 2021, during the early days of the NFT boom, Dorsey’s tweet sold for $2.9 million after a competitive bidding battle in which Tron founder Justin Sun was a major player.
But after Dorsey’s NFT went up for auction again this past week, no one bid high, and it effectively dropped its value by 99 per cent. The highest offer now on OpenSea, where anyone can list an NFT, even if a bidding period isn’t open, is about $12,000, which is still a small amount (compared to what the NFT was sold for). Is this a sign of the NFT market’s collapse?
This purchase came at the height of the NFT frenzy in 2021; if you recall a number of these non-fungible tokens, these are blockchain-based artwork prices. You get a serial code to say that you own that piece of digital art. Now, this was hyped in 2021, but the NFT world has cooled massively this year.
People claim that this trend fell due to many scams and hacks intersecting with significant money transfers, but others see it as the rise and fall of investment stocks – guaranteed to bounce back if there is a new interest.
While the failed auction shows that NFT hype has waned, the market is still very active, with trading volume hovering around $2 to $3 billion a month on OpenSea, up from $150 million a year ago.
People speculate that the Iranian crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi got swept up in a frenzy, buying Dorsey’s NFT for millions. He tells Forbes he paid such a hefty sum due to the NFT’s uniqueness and association with such a valuable company as Twitter.
Estavi further tried to brush off the humiliating rejection of his sales bid as him being choosy. “It’s important to me who wants to buy it; I will not sell this NFT to anyone because I do not think everyone deserves this NFT,” Estavi said.
But everyone is pointing fingers at the fact that Estavi planned to donate half the proceeds from the sale could have played against him, with people viewing it as an attempt to mop up a profit of several million dollars in the name of charity, The New Statesman reported.
Meanwhile, some believe Estavi’s NFT saga could have been a new bid for attention. “Bidders just realised what it was–a publicity stunt. A way to get exposure,” Forbes quoted NFT collector Blake Moser. “I think Sina Estavi accomplished what he was looking for–exposure to his NFT.”
“The lack of enthusiasm could have been caused by Estavi’s sketchy history, recent jail term, and two failed businesses, but that’s a story for another day.” A Twitter fight is breaking out, Jack Dorsey is outing social media, and all the while, the money just keeps rolling on.
Would you buy a Twitter post for that kind of money?