9500

An ape with a floor price of 5.66 ETH sold for 1,000 ETH. Don’t rush to call it an NFT comeback.

BAYC #9500: sushi-chef headband, cigar in its mouth, and pretty average rarity. Its previous sale was just 6.1 ETH on October 7. Two weeks later, it was worth over 160 times more. What did other apes sell for that same day? 6.09, 6, 5.84, 5.72. And the floor? 5.66, completely unchanged.

If someone really believes in blue-chip NFTs, they’ll sweep a row of floor listings—not pick one ordinary ape and pay 1,000 ETH for it. People on X have already pointed out that both buyer and seller are fresh wallets, and this ape has two other red flags. A fresh wallet selling to another fresh wallet for more than 170 times the floor price? To me, that looks like someone trading with themselves. As for why they’d do it, money laundering, inflating valuations, or giving their own wallet a “historical sale price” all sound more plausible than “buying out of conviction.”

Who profited? The platform still collected its fee, and accounts shouting “NFTs are back” got a wave of traffic. Anyone who rushed to sweep the floor after seeing the headline got taken in by fake news.

Sale records can be manipulated; listing depth and the floor price can’t. Those are the two things to look at with NFTs—not one-off astronomical sales.

#NFT #BAYC