Jack Dorsey’s First-Tweet NFT, Listed at $48 Million, Has Lost 99% Of Its Value
It’s all buying and selling for the sake of buying and selling
--
When crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased the NFT of Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet back in March 2021 for a staggering $2.9 million, the world was divided into two groups.
Some pointed to the sale as proof of both the NFT concept and the wider demand. Others couldn’t help but be completely baffled at the absurdity of all of it. I fall into the latter, struggling to process the fact that someone spent $2.9 million on a digital certificate that serves as proof of ownership for a tokenized version of a tweet that says “ just setting up my twttr,” while the tweet itself still lives on Twitter, and the owner of said tweet could delete it, or make further NFTs of it.
Still, the pointlessness of it didn’t appear to bother Estavi. Shortly after winning the auction, he did little to play down his bullishness for the future of the NFT. In an entirely-serious tweet, he wrote, “I think years later people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting.”
Well, just one year later, a different reality has set in.
When Beeple’s ‘Everydays — The First 5000 Days’ digital artwork sold at a first-of-its-kind auction for $69,346,250, it triggered a frenzied gold rush. People were turning to everything and anything and minting them into NFTs, slapping on some line about community or immeasurable value, and selling them to buyers who were eager to snap them up at a ‘low’ price and sell them to the next eager buyer. When Jack Dorsey minted his first tweet and put it up for auction, it was right at the beginning of this purple patch. NFT interest was skyrocketing, floor prices were rising, and the media was feeding the hype train. On reflection, as crazy as it sounds, the $2.9 million price tag made sense in that hyped-up climate.
So on April 6, when Estavi put the NFT back up for auction on OpenSea at a brain-melting price of $48 million, he was probably looking forward to making his money back (and then some) and relaxing in the knowledge that being stuck with a pointless digitalized tweet would soon become someone else’s problem.
