$100,000 worth of NFTs disappear forever, thanks to OpenSea bug
At least 42 non-fungible tokens on NFT marketplace OpenSea have been destroyed due to a bug on the platform. The NFTs are worth a minimum of $100,000.
Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), raised an alarm on the issue after noticing that an ENS name he tried to transfer was sent to a burn address. The implication is that the ENS name, which comes in the form of an NFT, can longer be accessed or moved. He tweeted:
A frantic call to OpenSea later, it transpires I was the first and apparently only victim of a bug introduced to their transfer page in the past 24 hours, which affected all ERC721 transfers to ENS names. Ownership of rilxxlir.eth is now permanently burned.
For the uninitiated, the ENS allows users to link blockchain addresses with domain names. Consequently, people can send transactions to human-readable names as opposed to existing complicated blockchain addresses.
According to Johnson, the ENS name that was burned was the first ever to be registered. The palindrome name was rilxxlir.eth. And although the developer registered the name with his personal funds, it was held in an ENS account. The NFT was lost when Johnson tried to transfer the name to his own account on OpenSea.
However, since Johnson still has control over the ENS name, he will still be able to modify the blockchain addresses that the name is linked to, without being able to move it.
Although Johnson earlier claimed that he was the only victim of the bug, other affected users reported the same issues. He received reports from other individuals who were affected by the same issue. The list eventually climbed to 32 affected transactions involving 42 NFTs.
A significant percentage of the affected NFTs were on the ERC-721 standard, with a based on the ERC-1155 standard. Johnson evaluated the floor prices of each of the NFTs and claimed that the value of all of them could be up to $100,000.
It appears the bug has now been fixed. However, OpenSea was yet to issue an official statement on the incident as of press time.
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