According to data from Nansen, nonfungible token (NFT) whale Jeffrey Hwang – known as Machi Big Brother – spent 1,010 tokens for a total of 11,680 Ether (ETH) or $18.6 million in 48 hours.
In a February 25 Twitter thread, Simian Nansen Psychometric Enhancement Technician Andrew Thurman highlighted trading activity over the previous two days, noting that “NFT dumping is the biggest possibility.”
Major selling events include 90 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, 191 Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFTs and 308 Otherdeed NFTs to name a few.
In possibly the biggest NFT dump, in the past 48 hours, Machi has sold 1,010 NFTs, including:
– 90 BAYC for 5707 ETH
– 191 MAYC to 3091 ETH
– 112 Azuki for 1644 ETH
– 308 Otherdeed for 582 ETHBut he didn’t make much profit for the collection. Why? pic.twitter.com/4NyMF3gzuy
— Andrew T (@Blockanalia) February 24, 2023
However, in fact, Machi Big Brother (Machi) immediately bought back 991 NFTs after the dump, with Thurman’s theory that it could be a game to make a profit while also doing “one big laundry trade to make a big Blur profit,” or “reasonable market manipulation naked.”
Machi is reportedly one of the biggest recipients of the BLUR token airdrop from NFT market startup Blur, which recently dethroned OpenSea as 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 number of tokens released depending on the level of user platform engagement and Ethereum-based NFT trading activity.
On February 17, Arkham Intel’s blockchain analytics platform showed that Machi had received 1.8 million BLUR tokens, and issued them all for $1.3 million.
Machi is not holding now $ BLUR – like everyone else, he sold everything.
In total, they received $1.3M for 1.8M Blur tokens, sold at an average price of $0.707.
It took 38 separate transactions for him to complete the sale $ BLUR! pic.twitter.com/nhJpGK1uFf
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) February 16, 2023
So, Machi might want to score some new BLUR tokens in the next round by increasing NFT trading activity, while other whales might look to do the same as well.
related: Founder Blur Pacman puts the NFT market war into perspective
Looking at the price of the upper collection floor that was initially cleared by Machi, BAYC, MAYC and Otherdeed NFTs have seen their prices drop by 7.77%, 9.2% and 8.16% in the past 24 hours, according to data from the NFT Price Floor.
“Looking for one person to airdrop destroys some markets,” Thurman said in a later post.
FWIW my “partial cashout” theory doesn’t seem to pan out — they haven’t sent anything to Binance in a while pic.twitter.com/FbqBsRzjHd
— Andrew T (@Blockanalia) February 25, 2023
At the time of writing, BLUR is sitting at $0.79 with a price drop of 17.7% over the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.
On February 22, the Blur team tweeted that the project will release $300 million worth of tokens in the second round, or “season two.”