OpenSea is a largest marketplace for trading of NFTs. Platform earned a little less than 5 billion dollars in sales volume in January, so far. Marketplace is used often by speculators and now we have another case with them.
Big error on the famous NFT marketplace OpenSea created a space for speculations. It allowed people to buy tokens for the price which had been listed in previous sales, even just after the start of collection selling. And owners of such NFTs didn't even realize that they were on sales.
Co-founder of Eliptic and their general scientist - Tom Robinson explained that the bug appeared because of a previously available feature, when it was possible to create a new listing of the NFT with a fresh price without closing of the last sell.
These old listings of NFTs are used for buying them for old prices which were set in the past. And such prices are often lower than today's valuation.
In the result of the exploit one ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection with number 9991 was bought for 0.77 ETH, it is around $1,747. But the real price of this cartoon ape for this moment was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And the new owner of this ape, which bought it below price, sold it 20 minutes after for 84.2 ETH. It is something around $189,040. As a result speculant saw a profit of $187,000.
Original owner of this NFT and victim of the speculation wrote several words on Twitter and said that he was shocked a lot. His golden NFT was sold gigantically below the price.
Tom Robinson also said that only eight NFTs were stolen that way in the result of the exploit detection. One person paid $133,000 for seven NFTs and then sold it for $934,000. It is an amazing profit for the fraudster. Tom also added that while crypto wallets are fully anonymous it is possible for thiefs to be caught in the result of fiat exchange.
NFT- market attracts many famous people and big wallets now, but has a lot of troubles with tokens’ security, so it may scare celebrities and many people from the other side. Eliptic data explains that $2 million dollars has been stolen from the owners of decentralized finance since 2020, so it seems a little bit dangerous to enter.
