Deconstructing the $110,000 F1 Delta Time NFT auction
Game theory for crypto whales
Animoca Brands has just closed the first auction for its official (and forthcoming) F1 blockchain game
.The winning bid (#37) was 415.9 Wrapped ETH, valued at over $110,000.
But, of course, this being an auction using the Ethereum blockchain, we can very simply delve into some of the details, thanks to tools such as Etherscan and the data held on the auction site
. Which is exactly what I decided to do.Note: I don’t claim to be any great forensic blockchain scientist so there may be some erroneous assumptions made. You can let me know in the comments.
And if you’re really interested, you can hear me talking about the auction on bid per bid basis for 20 minutes in the following video.
Otherwise, let’s look at four key charts.
First up, we can see how the value of the bids (listed in USD) rose through the auction, which as expected sees fairly steady progress at the start and ramps up as high value individuals start bidding aggressively against each other towards the end.
Another way of looking at the auction is the number of bids each bidder makes. The most was 9 bids by bidder ‘DWM’, followed by 7 bids by ‘robertwhite’, and the fight between these two characterizes the early ‘late stage’ of the auction.
‘DWM’ drops out having bid 120 WETH (out of a total of 125 WETH in their wallet), as ‘robertwhite’ takes the bidding to 180 WETH.
But then another bidder ‘Steve321’ enters the action and the mid ‘late stage’ of the auction sees this pair fighting it out. The battle ends as ‘Steve321’ bids their wallet maximum of 300 WETH, which ‘robertwhite’ counters with their wallet max 360 WETH.
It looks like game over for ‘Steve321’ but eventually they decide to convert some ETH in their wallet to WETH, and now raise the auction to their new wallet maximum of 396 WETH.
The auction is theirs… It’s not. An anonymous (anonymous to OpenSea at least) final bidder with 534 WETH in their wallet enters the stage for the first time and bids 415.9 WETH. They win.
Characterizing the auction in terms of the maximum value of each bidding wallet does indeed reflect this pattern. The further the auction progresses, the closer each bid gets to 100% of the total value of its bidding wallet.
The last graph shows how the bidding rose in terms of the percentage increase from one bid to the next.
The sequence of +50% bids is particularly interesting given the final five of this aggressive raises were all from ‘robertwhite’, who must have thought their game plan of quickly driving up the price had a better chance of winning than it did given the probability of new entrants.
Finally, it’s also worth noting that all four of the highest bidding wallets look like they had been created specifically for this auction.
I didn’t do any secondary tracking of wallets but the oldest wallet — created 12 days ago and funded through Binance — was by ‘DMW’, followed by five days ago for ‘robertwhite’ (also through Binance), and ‘Steve321’ (through Livecoin). The winning wallet was created a mere five hours before the auction’s end and funded through Bitfinex.
