From alleged hacking to phishing of OpenSea users
Early Sunday, the Ethereum contract of the largest non-fungible tokens (NFTs) marketplace OpenSea was believed to have been exploited, so multiple users had their NFTs stolen by the alleged hackers. Since OpenSea consumes the most gas (transactions) on Ethereum and is one of the most utilized use cases on the blockchain, its value for the crypto community as a whole is vital. On account of the latter, over the following hours, the Ethereum price slipped around 4%. It was later revealed that neither OpenSea nor their Ethereum contracts were exploited. Instead, it was a phishing attack based on a malicious contract that the attacker somehow got several users to approve, which enabled the person in question to steal their NFTs. OpenSea later disclosed that 17 individuals had been impacted by the phishing.
This stresses that the crypto market is severely sensitive to rumors on hacks, particularly on larger and frequently used protocols, as they act as one of the industry’s few lifelines to authentic use cases. Luckily, this turned out not to be (one more) such hack.
New York Stock Exchange files trademark to trade NFTs
In this NFT matter, OpenSea is not expected to have the market completely by themselves with both Coinbase and Kraken about to launch their respective NFT marketplaces. Likewise, OpenSea might now get competition from another company namely Intercontinental Exchange-owned New York Stock Exchange, known as NYSE. NYSE filed last week a trademark application to register the NYSE name concerning various products and services related to crypto, for instance, virtual reality and NFTs. Hence, we might see NYSE double down on NFTs in addition to the six NFTs the company released in April last year, each symbolizing the first trades of Spotify, Snowflake, Unity, DoorDash, Roblox, and Coupang on the exchange.