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Bored Ape Yacht Club is considered to be one of the top NFT collections on the blockchain but thanks to a bug on Opensea, the highly sought NFTs are now in the middle of turmoil. According to Dappradar, the BAYC collectibles have a price floor of $227,000. This was true until the Opensea bug opened the floodgates for price manipulation, which resulted in some Bored Ape NFTs being sold for as little as $1,300.
The NFTandGameFi team decided to take a closer look at what exactly happened. After all, it is not an everyday case scenario that NFTs worth over $200k sell out as if we live in an ongoing Black Friday market. What makes say this? Well, apparently the bug is no news to the community as it was first spotted in late December 2021.
The BAYC history in the making
First signs of the bug were first highlighted by Coindesk, and for some Opensea users, the rest was a tale of losses and no winnings. For some reason that Opensea still has no comments to, the bug was not addressed with a seriousness expected from a leading NFT marketplace and the pandemic slowly reached the BAYC community.
Twitter serves as the main conversation playground for early NFT adopters. Naturally, it is where the NFT owners fled to, in search of the answers. A Twitter user who goes by name of TBALLER.eth woke up to a notification that his Bored Ape has just sold for 0.77ETH. Three days later, and there is still no official feedback from Opensea on what has happened and whether there is any chance to return the NFT.
TBALLER’s recent tweet: ‘Still waiting on response from @opensea. Just HOPING for some good news.’
According to The Verge, another BAYC sold for 0.88ETH and then was quickly purchased by another NFT collector for 84ETH, which converts to a $190,000 profit. As with any accounts on blockchain, they are all visible to the public, and here is the account responsible for the resell. It includes other whale-like BAYC transactions that at times reach 125ETH, meaning that an 84ETH sale was not a record-breaker and there are more casualties of the hack.
How bugs squash apes
Bugs are an often occurrence when it comes to marketplaces and are no surprise given that even blockchains are subjected to them. Take the Polygon bug as an example, that put over $23 billion at risk. Back then, most of the moved crypto was returned but it is highly unlikely that the current Opensea situation will be resolved the same way.
The current loophole causes a mismatch between the information available in NFT smart contracts and the information shown by OpenSea’s UI, said software developer Rotem Karim. This lets hackers take advantage of old contracts that persist on the blockchain but are no longer present in the view provided by the OpenSea application.
Read also: The rise of Opensea NFT marketplace and its growth beyond
An intricacy of this matter is that it is unclear whether the attackers should be considered as hackers or just a bunch of people who got lucky. See, their actions were based on what Opensea marketplace was showing to them and hence, technically, this may not be considered as a hack.
BAYC bug NFT outlook
The worst part about this BAYC bug case, is that these Bored Apes were resold to Opensea users who were not aware of the bug. Instead they simply spent their hard earned cash on the NFTs they were after and now, they too can turn into the casualties of the event. It is hard to project what actions Opensea team plan to take in order to resolve the case, but for now it seems that similar marketplaces must take extra effort to protect their users’ NFT art. The more the merrier and third party audits can be a good start. Oh, and if you think that owning NFTs is risky, perhaps look into NFT stocks instead.
