OpenSea customer service migrating from Discord to Metalink to more adequately protect its community

On Tuesday, nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, platform OpenSea launched a server on Metalink to give verified owners of its collections a direct channel for support, feedback, and updates. In addition, OpenSea said it would no longer offer customer support over Discord DMs. Metalink is a collaboration app for NFT communities which offers users a place to view their collection's value and monitor its associated real-time transaction feed. In addition, channels hosted on Metalink are token-gated, meaning that proof of ownership of an NFT or social token is required to access content.

According to OpenSea, the platform is making the switch after fraudsters began impersonating support associates on its Discord page. As one crypto enthusiast, @seanbonner writes: 

"[It happens like this,] People go to the OpenSea Discord and post their support tickets. Meanwhile, attackers monitor these channels and then contact people [via DMs] posing as OpenSea support, armed with info about their support claim [to conduct scams]."

In a letter sent to the Metalink community this morning, Stevey Tromberg, Head of Community at OpenSea, stated:

"Our goal is to create a direct channel for you to interact with OpenSea to get support, offer feedback, receive updates, and share any other information that will help us better serve you. We will have dedicated community support staff from OpenSea spending a few hours a day in Metalink. All of whom will be marked as verified OpenSea staff [throughout the Metalink platform]."

Tromberg explained that the onboarding process would begin slowly, starting with owners of Cryptopunks, then Bored Apes, then World of Women, and more. "Without message requests, the ability to see who owns which NFTs, or seamless verification, it's difficult to feel safe on other chat platforms," He concluded.

Blockchain projects have been migrating en mass to social platforms, such as Discord, in the past year in an effort to better communicate with their growing communities. However, there has also been an influx of scammers utilizing sophisticated methods to compromise crypto enthusiasts' funds. In one notable instance, Hong Kong NFT project Monkey Kingdom lost $1.3M after hackers first breached Grape, a popular software for verifying users on Solana (SOL).

They used the exploit to take over an administrative account from the Money Kingdom staff, which in turn posted a phishing link in the Monkey Kingdom Discord's announcement channel. Some users who clicked on the link connected their wallet to a fake website thinking they were purchasing NFTs for an upcoming drop, but then were drained of their funds.