CoinShares' Twitter bot gives a 'fair price' on NFTs, some disagree

Digital asset manager CoinShares has launched an experimental Twitter bot that will, in theory, enable users to check the estimated fair market value of specific nonfungible tokens (NFTs), though a few have been less than enthused about the estimates given. 

The firm announced the bot dubbed “CoinSharesNFTAI” via Twitter on Oct. 13 and outlined that its algorithm is focused on aggregating different data sets from OpenSea to determine the supposed “fair price” of an NFT.

[1/4] We are very excited and proud to announce the official launch of @CoinSharesNFTAI. A simple tweet can let you know how much an NFT might be worth.

— CoinShares ‍ (@CoinSharesCo) October 13, 2022

In the Twitter thread, CoinShares said: “Pricing NFTs is no easy task” as their value is volatile and millions of them are available on the market, including ones with no trading history.

Some users weren't so impressed by the NFT value estimates, such as Goblin Town NFT hodler Jack Hermes (@systemic_bliss), commenting that CoinShares’ “model sucks” after it valued the NFT he bought for 2.694 Ether (ETH) at just 0.88 ETH, while another said it "seems to be a bit off" as the NFT in question was valued at 0.28 ETH by the bot despite having a floor of 0.48 ETH and a bid of 0.63 ETH. 

Cointelegraph tried the bot using Seth Green's well-known NFT BAYC #8398, which was recovered by Green in June for a $260,000 ransom after it was stolen by a hacker. The NFT currently has a "best offer" of 70.6 ETH on Opensea and was valued at 79.65 ETH by the Twitter bot, worth $106,000 at the time of writing. 

There are around 50 NFT projects on OpenSea supported at this stage, including blue chips such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Goblin Town, Pudgy Penguins and Cool Cats.

All of them are listed under the collections available this week, suggesting there is a weekly rotating list of supported collections. 

Let’s see what @CoinSharesNFTAI thinks of my gob…https://t.co/bGpAvyO5Ys

— systemic bliss (@systemic_bliss) October 13, 2022

The newly launched bot comes only days after the digital asset manager published a report on constructing an NFT price index, which its NFT bot is based on. In the report, quantitative trading analysts Yanis Bakhtaoui and Hugo Schnoering noted that:

“ERC-721 tokens are uniquely identified by an id and a set of properties, and cannot be interchangeable or divisible. This property makes these assets hard to price, as each NFT is unique.”

“These properties make the NFT market inherently illiquid: it is related to ask and bid, and if an owner does not want to sell his NFT, no one will be able to buy the same,” they added.

The report also outlines that market manipulation tactics such as wash trading — fraudulent transactions designed to pump prices — have had a key impact on NFT pricing.

Related: Uniswap Labs raises $165M as attention shifts to NFTs, Web3

To use the bot, people just need to tweet @CoinSharesNFTAI and provide a link to the token on OpenSea. It is not clear if other marketplaces will be supported moving forward.

@CoinSharesNFTAI https://t.co/Mk70DncI9K

— Dave Grannan (@grannan) October 14, 2022