The world’s largest digital collectibles marketplace, OpenSea, saw a substantial drop in its activity after a phishing attack that left traders poorer by an estimated $3 million.
According to data provided by DappRadar, non-fungible tokens trading plummeted in the last few days. The seven-day trading volume of OpenSea was down by 37%, as found out by DappRadar.
What actually happened?
As per Bloomberg News, an unidentified attacker hacked the OpenSea platform and stole 254 tokens from users operating there. The hacker sent malicious mail to the victims asking them to transfer their assets to a new contract. 17 Traders signed the agreement, which gave the hacker a blank check and allowed him to access the NFTS stored in the trader’s wallet.
The perpetrator netted a hefty gain after selling some of those assets. The CEO of OpenSea, Devin Finzer, said that the total value of tokens stolen was $1.7 million on Sunday. Researchers, however, have valued the pile between $2 million to $ 3 million. According to PeckShield, a blockchain security service, the stolen NFTs included four Bored Apes, out of which there was later sold to LooksRare, a rival platform, for a total of $667,000.
As per DappRadar, the last seven days saw the number of traders using the OpenSea platform drop by 19% to around 227,272. Trading Volume plunged by 65% on LooksRare, whereas volume rose by more than 215% on BloctoBay.
OpenSea, in a statement, said that there is a massive gap between the data hosted by DappRadar and the graphs used in the news story. He said those headline conclusions were not backed by any technical data or comparison to other platforms and were highly irresponsible. Also, the data in the text and the graph used in the story did not match. OpenSea suggested referring to Dune Analytics for complete and accurate data.
According to OpenSea, the hacker’s crypto wallet has been silent since the theft, and no transactional activity was spotted in the past 24 hours.
Nadav Hollander, Chief Technology Officer of OpenSea, said that more awareness was needed among the NFT traders about security issues after the incident. It was, however, noted that the attack happened because the hacker could fool the victims into migrating their contracts with phishing emails.
According to Hollander, submitting to unknown transactions or not sharing seed phrases has become widespread in the digital marketplace. Signing off-chain messages demand equal importance, he said.
