OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT trading site, was a bit like a matching app.
As the name “Open” Sea implies, any NFT issued by the Ethereum blockchain can be bought and sold here. The colorful NFTs floating in the Sea reminded me of the profiles of girls on matching apps. I believed that this was a place where I could be a player.
Actually, I found that it was much simpler than the sugar daddy game. They only look at the price and communicate with each other.
Every day, I would check OpenSea and just wait for a buyer to appear. It was frustrating that I had no way to approach potential buyers and had to just wait. The excitement I felt when I got my hands on the NFTs was fading. Boring, boring time passed.
Instead, I was focusing on my sugar daddy arrangement.
I was maintaining long-term sugar relationships with four different daddies, but there was still room for me to develop new ones. As long as I don’t go into non-platonic relationships, I need to make enough customers to generate steady revenue.
Especially this time, I decided to experiment and actively try to develop new business even in distant areas. I thought that I might be able to gain new customers by visiting distant places. The sugar daddy market was starting to become saturated. It was becoming difficult to make a lot of money without doing something different.
This time, I was going to a particularly distant place. I boarded the express bus. The number of passengers is still small, as the pandemic continues.
After the bus started running and things settled down, I connected my PC to the on-board WiFi and started my daily routine of checking my OpenSea account. I knew that it wasn’t safe to open a crypto-asset related site in public, but I decided that it wasn’t a problem since it was sparsely populated.
Then I got a shock that hit me like a claw to the heart. One of my NFTs had received an offer to buy. It was at a price of 10 ETH (about 37K dollars market price).
I almost accepted the offer immediately and then stepped back. If I had accepted the offer here, I could have made an immediate profit of nearly 40K dollars in market value. However, not much time had passed since the offer was made. There was still time to think about it.
First, I investigated the account of the person who put in the offer. Ethereum is a real blockchain, and the entire transaction history of every account is publicly available. I soon found out that the person who made the offer was in possession of a large amount of NFTs. He or she was a very wealthy person who possessed NFTs that could be traded for hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
Then I noticed that he or she had made a buy order offers for eight ENS domain NFTs at once. My NFT was one of them. I started to assess the risks. First, there was the risk that the buyer would realize that the capitalized ENS domain was not a normal one. Then there was the risk that he would simply change his mind and withdraw his offer. Also, the risk that one of the eight NFTs would be fulfilled and the others would be withdrawn; and so on. I decided that none of these risks are too great right now.
There was something I had to do first and foremost. I immediately logged into my own server and set up the bot. “CryptoPunks.eth”, “BAYC.eth”, “MetaMask.eth”, “ERC20.eth”, “ERC721.eth”, “Airdrop.eth”, “Whale.eth”, and any other cryptocurrency term I can think of. I have found a gold mine! I needed to collect NFTs with a bot as soon as possible.
The fee to obtain an NFT for an ENS domain is around a few hundred dollars, depending. If a few hundred dollars had the potential to generate tens of thousands of dollars in profit, I should have been quick to pursue that possibility first. The offer from buyer could have been left alone for a while.
The bot was acquiring more and more NFTs. I became the first person on the express bus to acquire 10 ENS domains, and all I could think about was how I would put the items for sale on OpenSea as soon as possible.
The OpenSea website is not well designed in a flattering way. The behavior of newly acquired NFTs is also somewhat poor. Reflections are slow. Last time, there was a problem with the price for sale not being reflected immediately.
There was another problem this time. Usually the NFTs of newly created ENS domains are automatically reflected in OpenSea, but they didn’t get updated quickly this time.
By the time I returned to my seat and finished drinking the rest of my coffee, the newly acquired NFTs still had not appeared in my account. All ten of them, not a single one was reflected.
I had a bad feeling, so I stopped the bot’s operation. Something was wrong. After thinking about it for a while, I changed the settings of the bot and tried to get a single ENS domain consisting of only lowercase letters.
This time, there was no problem, and in a very short time, NFT appeared in my account.
Then I immediately noticed that the newly acquired NFT image was remarkably different from the previous one. The images was much higher resolution and the design was much more sophisticated and beautiful.
My concern was confirmed.
I thought things had gone a little wrong. There was probably some kind of major overhaul, and as part of it, NFTs of ENS domains containing capital letters could no longer be registered in OpenSea. Perhaps ENS domains such as the newly issued ‘MetaMask.eth’ could no longer be traded as NFTs. Fortunately, the NFTs I had issued before were still in my account. No problem. My offer of 10 ETH was still valid.
If I look at it another way, the value of the capitalized ENS domain has increased. You can’t register a new one with OpenSea anymore. Yes, that’s right. Scarcity has increased! No one can issue a domain like DeFi.eth and sell it anymore. I convinced myself to shake off my doubts.
I had to go see my sugar daddy now. I didn’t have time to think too much about it.
Although I enjoyed the date and dinner with the new sugar daddy, I was really thinking about the 10ETH offer the whole time. He offered me a non-platonic relationship, but I politely declined. He smiled and accepted it for the time being so as not to break the trust of the relationship.
After receiving the allowance and transportation fee from him, I went out to the city at night. I was tired, but I didn’t have time to relax because I had booked another bus for my quick return trip.
I thought about my strategy in the unfamiliar crowd of the city. Since I couldn’t expect any more new capitalized ENS domains to be issued, I would have to be very careful with the current offer.
I was tempted to pull out my PC and press the “Accept Offer” button right now. I resisted the urge and took another closer look at the buyer’s account on my phone. I noticed that the buyer had already been very active in buying ENS domains. A few days ago, he had purchased another ENS domain for 30 ETH with a market value of over $100,000. My mind was boggled again by the tremendous amount of money.
There were two things I could do right now. The first was to accept the buy order offer and get 10 ETH. The other was to send a counter offer and offer a higher asking price than 10 ETH. Exhaustion prevents me from thinking straight.
The buyer was clearly a billionaire. I couldn’t imagine what kind of thinking and living he would do.
By the time I got home, I was completely drained. I decided to wait and see for a while and went to sleep.
The next morning, I woke up, opened my PC, logged into OpenSea, and checked the 10 ETH offer. No problem. My money was still there. I should still be able to enjoy this time a little more.
In a good mood, I decided to clean my room a bit and take care of some of my accumulated chores, but I didn’t get much done, because I kept checking my OpenSea account every ten minutes. I never thought it would feel so good to see 40K dollars right at my fingertips.
I repeatedly looked at OpenSea’s offer like a human being with a rewired brain. After dozens of confirmations, the offer of 10 ETH for me was easily canceled.
I was so stunned that I couldn’t even speak. Why couldn’t I accept the 40K dollars in front of me right away? I could only think that I had zero talent in trading.
Unable to hide my shock, I managed to distract myself by doing some housework. It was as if the room had changed from the way it was before. I kept checking the OpenSea site, hoping that some mistake would be made and the missing offer would appear again, like a pathetic animal checking its feeder over and over.
Then something amazing happened right away. The buyer really sent me another offer of 10 ETH. I didn’t understand what was going on and immediately investigated his offer. I found out that he or she had withdrawn his offers once and then immediately sent another offers to the 8 NFTs he had sent the previous offer to.
I was confused, but couldn’t hit the accept button again. Greed got in the way. Since I couldn’t issue any more new NFT for capitalized ENS domain, my desire to make as much money as possible became stronger. Also, to be honest, I was puzzled by the buyer’s behavior and didn’t know what to do.
There was a meeting at the lab today, and I had to go. I also started to consider if I should make a counter-offer to the buyer, but I didn’t have enough time to make a decision.
“What is …… your best crypto, Senpai?”
I asked that question after the lab meeting was over. The atmosphere was such that I couldn’t leave right away, but I didn’t feel like doing any work, so I needed a topic to chat about to distract myself.
“Bitcoin, after all. And Ethereum.”
“So it’s the high road.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t do any trading?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“The price has gone up a lot, hasn’t it? You don’t want to sell it?”
“I’m not saying I have it.”
“Well, it’s just a hypothetical. It’s just a tentative story. Isn’t it difficult to find the right time to sell?”
“Yes, it is. It’s more difficult to sell than to buy, isn’t it?
I nodded my head.
“Maybe it’s better to think about selling only half or selling little by little.
Said Senpai. ‘Unfortunately, NFT can’t sell only half of it,’ I muttered in my mind.
“But, if you can sell it at a price you’re comfortable with, that’s fine, right? It’s like the value of cryptocurrency is determined only by your own feelings.”
That was the end of the conversation. I would have liked to hear more about it, but it was difficult because I might have to disclose some of my own circumstances if I wanted to talk about it in detail.
I thought about the value of the NFT I was going to sell. 10 ETH was a price I could accept. Maybe I was being too greedy after all. I’ll sell it as soon as I get home. It’s not good to think too much.
When I got home, I jumped on my computer and opened OpenSea. It showed my account. The 10ETH offer had been cancelled again.
But something even more amazing had happened. To my surprise, the buyer had now raised the price and made another offer at 15 ETH (worth 56K dollars) . The offer had a time limit set, but there was still some time left.
Why is this person repeatedly canceling and making offers like this? One hypothesis is to send a notification to the owner of the NFT who received the offer. OpenSea has the ability to send a notification when an offer is received. It could be a strategy to increase notifications by cancelling the offer and making another offer.
I was impressed by this way of thinking. He must be a very skilled NFT collector.
On the other hand, it could be said that the buyer’s desire to buy NFT was strong enough to take such an aggressive tactic. After much deliberation, I decided to send a counter-offer. I had a strong urge to win the game as soon as possible. However, seeing that he or she was so eager to buy, I thought it would be a good idea to make a move from my side. It seemed unlikely that a skilled collector like him/her would take my amateurish offer to heart, but I decided to send him/her a counter-offer with some extra money.
Just one more day. That was my thought. If the price stays at this level for one more day, then I would accept the offer. One more day. It’s okay. I should still be able to pull it off from here. Remember your daddy arrangement. Don’t sell yourself short.
That’s what I thought, and I forced myself to accept the idea, but I might just be putting off my decision because of greed. I didn’t think I could stand being shaken over and over again like this. I understood that his offer tactic was extremely effective.
The next day, I knew I had made a mistake. The worst thing I could think of had happened. My NFTs had been delisted from OpenSea all together.
Part 1
https://medium.com/@puyu.eth/nft-opensea-and-bot-tokyo-sugar-baby-story-1-of-3-ed4c0fc46f5
Part 3
Soon
