Poop Emoji Bitcoin Ordinal Sells For $28k – Laundering Or Legit?
A Bitcoin Ordinal depicting a poop emoji was sold for 1.2 BTC — equivalent to roughly $28,000 at press time — on March 1.
The ordinal is marked Inscription #121 and was minted on block 773820.
It is unclear whether the transaction was a legitimate sale or a wash trade attempt to increase interest in the mainstream and general NFT ecosystem.
NFT Wash Trading
Wash trading is when the buyer and seller in a transaction are the same or in cahoots – usually to artificially increase the price of an asset by generating interest and causing FOMO.
Due to the lack of regulation and the inherent anonymity of the industry, the NFT markets have been riddled with wash trading since their inception. Currently, it is very difficult to say whether a buyer and seller in a trade are different people.
Historically, NFT laundry traders have taken advantage of the digital nature of these markets and the lack of regulation to fake sales. They put the NFT up for sale at an exorbitant price and then buy it with another account. This gives the impression that the NFT is valuable, which arouses interest and can potentially lead to a real sale to an unsuspecting buyer.
Due to the inherent anonymity of the crypto and NFT industry, it is difficult to tell whether a trade is legitimate or not at first glance. Wash traders can use as many wallets and accounts as necessary to try to hide their actions, and investors should be increasingly cautious when engaging in NFT trades.
In 2022, research revealed that approximately 95% of all trading volume on NFT platform LooksRare was related to laundry trading.
Meanwhile, Dune Analytics’ research found that approximately 45% of all NFT trading volume on Ethereum was linked to shady trades.
Ordinals
Ordinals are additional bits of data associated with satoshis, or sats, which are the lowest denomination, or atomic unit, of Bitcoin. Each BTC is made up of 100,000,000 rates – the same way that every dollar is made up of 100 cents.
In a nutshell, the Ordinal Protocol allows users to enter additional data in batches. The data can be audio, video, text or a jpeg image. In the case of inscription #121, the ordinal is a jpeg image of a poop emoji.
The Ordinal Protocol was developed by Casey Rodarmor and launched on January 21st. The crypto community remains divided on whether ordinals are good for the Bitcoin ecosystem or harmful to its overall image.
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