Whale sells 1,010 NFTs in 48 hours in ‘biggest NFT dump ever’

According to data from Nansen, non-fungible token (NFT) whale Jeffrey Hwang – known as Machi Big Brother – dumped 1,010 tokens for a total of 11,680 Ether (ETH) or $18.6 million in 48 hours.

In a February 25 Twitter thread, Nansen’s Simian Psychometric Enhancement technician Andrew Thurman highlighted the trading activity of the previous two days, noting that it is “probably the biggest NFT dump ever.”

The major sale event included 90 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, 191 Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFTs and 308 Otherdeed NFTs to name a few.

Notably, however, Machi Big Brother (Machi) immediately bought back 991 NFTs after the dump, with Thurman theorizing that it could be a play to either book some profit while also executing “one big wash trade to generate huge Blur airdrop -profit,” or a “fairly naked market manipulation.”

Machi is reportedly one of the biggest recipients of the BLUR token airdrop from upstart NFT marketplace Blur, which recently unseated OpenSea from being the top-ranked NFT platform in terms of trading volume.

On February 14, the project began distributing its first round of airdrops to the community, with the amount of airdropped tokens depending on the user’s level of platform engagement and Ethereum-based NFT trading activity.

On February 17, blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intel indicated that Machi had received 1.8 million BLUR tokens, cashing it all out for $1.3 million.

As such, Machi may be looking to score some fresh BLUR tokens in the next round by increasing NFT trading activity, while other whales may be looking to do the same as well.

Related: Blur founder Pacman puts the NFT market battle war into perspective

Looking at the floor prices of the top pools that Machi originally dumped, BAYC, MAYC and Otherdeed NFTs have seen their prices fall 7.77%, 9.2% and 8.16% in the last 24 hours, according to NFT Price Floor data.

“One man’s quest for an airdrop is destroying some markets,” Thurman noted in a subsequent post.

At the time of writing, BLUR is at $0.79 with the price having fallen by 17.7% over the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.

On February 22, the Blur team became tweeted that the project will soon release tokens worth $300 million in its second round, or “season two.”