Man ‘accidentally’ destroys NFT worth ₹1 crore, loses a third of his net worth

A man ‘accidentally’ destroyed his CryptoPunk #685, a Non Fungible Transfer (NFT) asset he had bought weeks ago. The man took to micro-blogging site Twitter to talk about the debacle.

The NFT that the collector destroyed cost 77 Ether or about ₹1 crore. The man has stated that he destroyed the NFT while ‘he was being too careful trying to wrap it’.

“Today I accidentally burned a cryptopunks NFT trying to wrap punk 685. I was so focused on following the instructions exactly, that I slipped up, destroying a third of of my net worth in a single transaction,” Riley tweeted. “Please keep in mind I’m not a dev (developer), not at all familiar with these contracts, and don’t really understand how wrapped punks work.”

What is wrapping an NFT?

Wrapping an NFT is a process that allows NFTs to be traded on Ethereum marketplaces such as OpenSea or Rarible.

The collector Brandon Riley, on Twitter, noted that he had followed the step by step process to wrap the NFT and complete the transaction, he accidentally sent his NFT to a burn address.

Riley also mentioned that the whole incident caused him to lose a third of his net worth in a single transaction.

What is a burn address?

A private key is a password used to access the funds held inside a digital wallet and a burn address is a virtual wallet that doesn’t have a private key, so no one can access it. Such wallets usually used to permanently destroy NFTs, often to create scarcity and to potentially cause the price of similar NFTs to rise.

What happened to Brandon Riley’s NFTs?

Riley took to Twitter to admit that he is unaccustomed with the workings of NFT and thus should have had an expert guide him on the process. “In hindsight it’s very easy to see all of the mistakes I made,” Riley tweeted. “This is truly a devastating mistake for me. But I did this myself, and it is no one’s fault but my own. Both the beauty and the curse of self-custody.”

Please keep in mind I’m not a dev, not at all familiar with these contracts, and don’t really understand how wrapped punks work.

The reality is, that because I’m so unfamiliar I should have had another set of eyes. In hindsight it’s very easy to see all of the mistakes I made.

— Brandon Riley (@vitalitygrowth) March 25, 2023

Two days later, however, a crypto enthusiast did manage to resurrect Punk 685 although as an ordinal inscribed on a satoshi.

Ordinal inscriptions, similar to NFTs, are digital assets inscribed on a satoshi — the lowest denomination of a Bitcoin.

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