Benzinga | Mar 22, 2021 09:18AM EDT

Jack Dorsey NFT Sale Of First-Ever Tweet Secures $2.5M Bid On Auction's Expiry

Square Inc (NYSE:SQ) and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey's first-ever tweet, put on auction as a non-fungible token, has garnered a leading bid of $2.5 million at the end of the stipulated deadline.

What Happened: The leading bid of 1630.58 Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) was made by Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi. ETH traded 0.3% higher at $1,789.68 at press time.

The second-largest bid came from Justin Sun, the founder of Tron (CRYPTO: TRON) and current CEO of Rainberry, Inc. Sun and Estavi were engaged in a war of bids that saw the price rise from $363,000 to $2.5 million.

Dorsey said earlier that he intends to convert all the proceeds of the auction to Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) and send the funds to Give Directly's Africa Response, which provides cash assistance to families living in extreme poverty in Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, and Malawai.

The entrepreneur said he would be accepting bids until March 21.

BTC traded 0.81% higher at $57,744.55.

See also: What is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT)?

Why It Matters: Dorsey's first Twitter post was made in March 2006 and it received bids as high as $88,888.88 within minutes of the executive tweeting about the auction earlier this month.

A tweet by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), attracted a bid of $1.12 million by Estavi as well. The tweet featured Musk's announcement of selling a song on NFT's as an NFT.

The entrepreneur later changed his mind about selling the song, which also evoked interest from the artist Beeple who offered Musk $69 million for the NFT.

Sun had also participated in a Christie's auction where Beeple sold his artwork dubbed "The First 5000 Days" but he was outbid by another buyer in the last 20 seconds by $250,000.

Beeple revealed Sunday that the successful bidder was a person from Singapore who paid $69 million for the art. The artist said NFT art is "absolutely" in a bubble.

Read Next: 'Morons,' Banksy's Art Work Burned In Real Life, Sells For $394,000 As A Non-Fungible Token

Price Action: Square shares closed nearly 0.2% higher at $224.84 on Friday and fell 0.15% in the after-hours session. On the same day, Twitter shares closed almost 0.7% lower at $66.23 and fell 0.12% in the after-hours session.