OpenSea Completes Contract Migration To Fix $1M NFT Listing Exploit

Key Insights

• The Ethereum NFT Marketplace migrated its smart contract to protect traders’ listings
• OpenSea announced this a week ago after multiple users lost their NFTs due to the listing exploit
• To prevent a similar occurrence, OpenSea even launched a new listing manager feature last month

The recent announcement from OpenSea asking its users to migrate their NFT listings to the new smart contract was followed by an update today.

As the deadline came to an end, the NFT marketplace informed its users that users might lose some features during the migration.

The Exploit

Last month on this day, OpenSea traders observed some suspicious activities on their accounts as they noticed their NFTs were selling without their approval.

Upon investigation, OpenSea observed that exploiters discovered these users’ old NFT listings of lower prices. They then managed to buy those listings and thus stole the NFTs for a fraction of their actual value.

The exploit, which resulted in over $1 million worth of NFT losses, sent ripples across OpenSea, which led the marketplace to reassess its security protocols.

In response, they established multiple new prevention methods, the biggest of which was migrating to a new smart contract.

The Migration

As per the details shared by OpenSea, the migration to the new smart contract will ensure that all the inactive listings on the marketplace are terminated.

At the same time, it will enable users to make the most of the new features of bulk cancellations and more descriptive signatures.

However, OpenSea disabled a few of the features to ensure safe migration. In regards to the same, OpenSea tweeted:

“During the contract migration you may not see your migrated listings. Due to this, floor prices may temporarily vary; To protect your listings, no bids or purchases can be made on your migrated items until the migration completes. At this point, your listings will reappear in your Active Listings tab.”

They also mentioned that in the meanwhile, NFTs floor prices could vary, which would be fixed once the migration is complete.

NFTs Stolen, Again

Soon after the migration announcement last week, some users lost their NFTs to phishing attacks, which OpenSea stated was not originated from the marketplace.

Although three of the 250 stolen NFTs were found by Mintable and returned to their owners. Some more stolen NFTs were tracked down on the LooksRare marketplace.

Frustrated by the repeated exploits, one victim filed a $1 million lawsuit against OpenSea.

The plaintiff was one of the people affected by the listing exploit in which the exploiter bought the user’s Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT for just 0.01 ETH ($27).

The community hopes that the repeated exploits and attacks will come to an end with this migration. However, the concerns are valid since OpenSea is the biggest NFT marketplace globally.

Last month it sold almost $5 billion worth of NFTs, and sales this month have already crossed $3 billion.

Thus this could be the end of OpenSea’s blunder stories.