OpenSea bug appears to have destroyed nearly $100K in NFTs

Published at: Sept. 9, 2021

Reports have emerged that a bug on OpenSea's marketplace has deleted user-owned NFTs worth 28.44 Ether (ETH), nearly $100,000 at the time of writing.

The information was revealed online by Nick Johnson, lead developer of Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, who reportedly lost an NFT that was linked to the first ENS named rilxxlir.eth. ENS is a naming system that allows users to store text-based content as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

While transferring the NFT from an ENS account to a personal account, Johnson noticed that the token was sent to what appeared to be a burn account:

“I went to OpenSea, hit 'transfer' and entered 'nick.eth'. Moments later, transaction complete! rilxxlir.eth transferred to 0x0000...0000edd899b. Wait, what?”

According to Johnson, his first interaction with OpenSea confirmed that the NFT-burning bug was introduced on the platform’s transfer page, affecting all ERC721 transfers to ENS names for the past 24 hours.

OpenSea said:

“We've reached out to the small number of users who were affected by the issue yesterday where sending an NFT to an ENS name sent it to the encoded version of the literal text (e.g. "OS.eth") instead of the associated address. This was a bug we introduced and fixed that day.”

Johnson tracked down at least 30 transactions from 21 accounts in which NFTs were lost due to the system bug. Based on the information, a total of 42 NFTs were burned.

Johnson claimed that the lost ENS token held no monetary value but was treasured as the first ENS name ever registered.

OpenSea did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.

Related: OpenSea’s team of 37 staff is currently handling 98% of combined NFT volumes

OpenSea became a crypto unicorn in August after raising $100 million in an Andreessen Horowitz-led funding round. At the time, OpenSea’s team of 37 members reportedly handled 98% of the platform’s NFT volume.

To ramp up the hiring process, the company offered 1 ETH for successful referrals. “Trying to supplement our hiring process with some guerrilla recruiting due to the pressing need for manpower,” said Nate Chastain, OpenSea head of product.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, OpenSea is currently the largest consumer of Ethereum network fees.

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