Last Updated on March 27, 2023 by Bitfinsider

An NFT trader was devastated Friday when he discovered that a CryptoPunk he bought for 77 Ethereum had gone up in flames after he sent the pricey piece of digital art to a burn address by mistake.

An NFT trader was devastated Friday when he discovered that a CryptoPunk he bought for 77 Ethereum had gone up in flames after he sent the pricey piece of digital art to a burn address by mistake.

According to the Ethereum block explorer Etherscan, CryptoPunk #685 was worth roughly $129,000 in Ethereum when Riley purchased it.

Riley attempted to wrap his punk as an ERC-721 token using a guide he found online, creating a new digital token that showed he owned CryptoPunk #685 but was compatible with NFTfi.com. However, by entering the incorrect address, CryptoPunk #685 has been lost permanently.

Riley’s unfavourable situation typifies the difficulties that many in the digital assets industry experience as a result of the often complex and irreversible nature of transactions. Riley can’t get his lost CryptoPunk back because there are no money intermediaries involved, which he describes as “both the beauty and the curse of self-custody.”

NFToga, a Twitter user, pointed out that Riley’s guide has since been updated, including wording explicitly warning people not to send CryptoPunks to wallets formatted as burn addresses.

Riley asked Yuga Labs, which acquired the IP to CryptoPunks from Larva Labs last year, if he could buy the v1 version of CryptoPunk #685. After a bug in the initial collection’s smart contract was discovered, CryptoPunks v2 was released.