In January of this year, blockchain analysis firm Elliptic reported that an exploit at OpenSea, using uncancelled listings, has enabled five opportunists to buy NFTs well-below market price and then resell them for a total of over $1million. $1million in NFTs exploited through uncancelled listings The moral of this story is that the internal regulation of NFT marketplaces is not keeping pace with the demand, as can be seen by another incident OpenSea was facing months later. The following day OpenSea confirmed the resignation of their Head of Product, affirming their commitment to “ a level playing field for buyers, sellers, creators, collectors, developers, and those who are new to the space.” Ironically it was the transparency of the blockchain that brought the issue to light in the first place, courtesy of a Twitter sleuth: Without actually spelling it out, this amounted to ‘insider trading’, as that privileged access would enable them to make significant financial gain by quickly flipping the NFTs. On September 15th 2021, OpenSea released a statement announcing that one of their employees had purchased NFTs they knew were to be displayed on the site’s homepage. Started in 2017 it has raced past Unicorn status, to a recent valuation of an eye-watering $13.3bn, but such rapid growth, within a rapidly emerging space and without clear operating guidelines, has unsurprisingly seen a corresponding rise in hacks and scams. OpenSea - a marketplace for minting and selling NFTs - is easily the largest company to have emerged from the Metaverse and NFT boom.
Inevitably, as the hype and opportunity around the Metaverse have grown, so have the stories of the scams and theft of NFTs. Mark Zuckerberg declared it ‘ the next chapter for the internet’, Ariana Grande held a virtual concert in Fortnite and Snoop Dogg sold a plot next to his Metaverse Mansion for $450,000. 2021 was the year that the Metaverse became a thing.
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