Franklin Caldwell, otherwise known as Franklinisbored in Web3, lost 100 ETH ($150k) in an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain name transaction on Wednesday 20th July 2022. Franklin is the 7th largest Bored Ape Yacht Club holder in existence as he currently holds 57 of the ‘blue chip’ collection.
First, What Are ENS Domain Names?
ENS is a distributed technology based on the Ethereum blockchain that provides an elegant solution to long and confusing Crypto address’s names. Essentially, they are domain names that point to and simplify Crypto wallet addresses.
Great, So What Happened?
On Tuesday 19th July, 2022, Franklin registered the ENS domain name “stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth” using an alternate Ethereum wallet and then placed a 100 Wrapped Ethereum (WETH) bid on it. Franklin explained on Twitter that it was a joke to make ENS Bids Bot Tweet about it. Then shortly after, Franklin sold the ENS domain for almost 1.9 ETH ($2,880) and celebrated his profit publicly.
What he didn’t realize, is that he had forgotten to cancel his 100 WETH bid that he had placed earlier. Only 15 minutes after the initial transaction was made, the new ENS holder accepted the bid and gained 100 ETH. Franklin got his joke ENS name back but was left 100 ETH poorer.
In a Tweet, Franklin admitted that he lost 100 ETH while celebrating a joke about his domain name sale. “This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century. I deserve all of the jokes and criticism” he went on to say.
While this may seem like a lot of money to almost everybody, to Franklin, it’s only a tiny percentage of his entire portfolio. There have been both humorous and compassionate reactions on Twitter. Regardless, this event is very meme-able, which is something that the web3 community loves. This occurrence has created a great discussion to make the best of a bad situation, and his Twitter engagement and activity are up.
It is likely that this will be the first and last time Franklin will ever make a mistake of such scale. This is the true definition of learning a lesson the hard way.
