This Fatal Mistake Led to a $129K Loss for This NFT Trader

Hey Hackers!

On March 24th, an NFT trader named Brandon Riley, who goes by @vitalitygrowth on Twitter, accidentally burned CryptoPunk #685 and destroyed the NFT forever.

Burning a digital asset involves sending it to a wallet address from which it can never be retrieved, which effectively removes the digital asset from circulation.

Here is the transaction showing Brandon Riley purchased the CryptoPunk NFT for 77 ETH, which equaled approximately $129K dollars.

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x1e37be379e864643e013a69c68ed92f064df0cf9c52c4a452335821bb35967b8

Below is the initial Tweet from Brandon Riley stating that he accidentally burned his CryptoPunk NFT.

He also called on YugaLabs, the creators of CryptoPunks, to sell him a CryptoPunks ᵛ¹ NFT, which is compatible with ERC-721, as a consolation prize for his epic failure.

Brandon Riley replied to his original tweet with a thread explaining how exactly he made the mistake of burning his NFT instead of wrapping it.

It appears that Riley was following an online guide on how to wrap the NFT as a ERC-721 token and make it compatible with NFTfi, which is a liquidity protocol for NFTs.

This was necessary as the CryptoPunks NFT collection was created before ERC-721 became the industry standard for NFTs, and therefore CryptoPunks are not compatible with some marketplaces and defi applications.

In the end, Riley accidentally input the wrong wallet address, and just like that the NFT was lost forever.

Brandon Riley claimed that his intention, for wrapping the NFT, was to borrow liquidity against it, and not because he intended to sell it on the upstart NFT marketplace, Blur, as rumors suggested.

“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.

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. Stay safe out there everyone, and please be way more careful than I was. Thank you to so many of you for the kind words.”

-Brandon Riley, @vitalitygrowth

Seeing a story like this is quite sad, and I really can’t feel anything but sorry for this NFT trader for the mistake he made.

There is also a lesson to be learned from this, and it is that if you do not know what you are doing in the world of web3, then you could potentially make a huge mistake and lose your assets.

Transactions made on the blockchain are permanent and there is no customer support to help you recover assets.

This puts all the responsibility on you, the user, to be sure of what you are doing or you could run the risk of losing everything.

What are your thoughts on this news?

How would you react if you just burned an NFT worth 77 ETH?

Would you be sharing the news on Twitter?

Do you have sympathy for someone who makes a huge mistake like this?

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Also published here.