Opensea nft phishing attack could have triggered drop in trading volume

Hundreds of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were stolen from OpenSea users on Saturday, sparking rumours that the world's largest NFT marketplace was hacked and $200 million was lost in

value. Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, clarified on Twitter that it was apparently a phishing scam directed at 17 individual users, and not connected to the NFT marketplace

itself. This phishing attack apparently exploited a flexibility in the Wyvern Protocol, an open-source and decentralised protocol used by several marketplaces. He also said that rumours of a

$200 million hack are false and that the attacker has $1.7 million of Ether in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs. A spreadsheet put together by blockchain security and data

analytics company PeckShield lists 254 tokens stolen over the course of three hours, including tokens from popular collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats, and Azuki. OpenSea has

also been struggling with a plagiarism problem. It offers 'lazy minting' which uses a portion of the selling price as gas, effectively allowing users to mint for free. It tried to

put a 50-item limit on this free-minting tool because it was being abused, but later relented. It is valued at around $13 billion.