Tron CEO Justin Sun and Bridge Oracle CEO Hakan Estavi have been competing to be the highest bidder
Over the weekend, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey shared a link to an auction in which his first ever tweet is being sold as a non-fungible token (NFT). The tweet in question reads: “just setting up my twttr” and was posted in 2006.
The auction is taking place on Valuables by Cent, a recently launched marketplace for buying and selling tweets as NFTs. The tweet itself will remain on Twitter after the sale – so what exactly are people bidding for and why would anyone pay for it when they could just screenshot the tweet?
Well the auction winner will receive a digital certificate of the tweet, which is cryptographically signed and verified by the creator making it unique. As for the why, buying someone’s tweet is the blockchain equivalent of getting their autograph, and it may be purchased for sentimental value or as a financial investment.
There has been plenty of interest so far – Tron CEO Justin Sun seemed pretty determined to win the tweet. He initially made an offer of $500,000 before upping his bid three times to make it $2 million. But even that wasn’t enough.
The current highest offer is $2.5 million, which was made by Bridge Oracle CEO Hakan Estavi. He is also the highest bidder on a tweet by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, with an offer of $121,000, though he claimed he was willing to go up to $10 million.
Tweets are just the latest asset to be monetised through NFTs. NFT artworks have been growing in popularity over the last couple of years with some even heralding them as a new renaissance. In fact, just last week a Banksy artwork was converted to an NFT with the original being burned.
The piece is titled Morons and depicts an auction house full of collectors bidding for a framed canvas of the words “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT.” It was purchased by a group of tech enthusiasts from Injective Protocol and Superfarm who livestreamed the burning of it and put the NFT version up for sale on NFT marketplace OpenSea, where it was sold for 228.69 ETH ($385,000).
Whether the artwork was destroyed or simply translated into another form is debatable, and only time will tell if NFTs of art or tweets actually hold value in the future, but for now at least they seem to be garnering a lot of attention.