Quick Take:
- OpenSea has frozen 16 stolen Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFTs worth $2.2 million.
- Twitter account toddkramer.eth tweeted Thursday saying their wallet had been hacked.
- Some users are feeling aggrieved by the action taken by OpenSea to freeze buying and selling assets.
Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, OpenSea on Thursday froze 16 stolen Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFTs, resulting in user uproar. OpenSea had earlier this week banned two fake NFT projects from listing on the platform.
According to the report, one Clonex, seven Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and eight Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs valued at about 615 ETH, or about $2.28 million were stolen from the wallet.
The toddkramer.eth account, which links to the Ross+Kramer Art Gallery in New York, pleaded with OpenSea and the community for help, resulting in the freezing of the assets.
As a result, some OpenSea users have pointed to the lack of decentralization, an important feature of cryptocurrencies.
Kramer, who stored his NFTs in a hot wallet, claimed that he was unsuspectingly drawn into a phishing scam that gained control of his account after clicking a deceptive link.
A hot wallet is a cryptocurrency storage address connected to the internet. In the NFT space, MetaMask is the leading supplier of hot wallets. OpenSea users are bemoaning the aspect of losing decentralization by failing to provide in-house NFT wallets. One Twitter user Kw.Sol replying to Kramer, wrote, “feels pretty anti-crypto to be asking third parties to do this and ideally they shouldn’t be able to.”
Famed software engineer Grady Booch, seconding Kw.Sol wrote, “Silly me. And here I thought that the code is the law and that one of the very ideas of cryptocurrencies was the elimination of any possibility of centralized intervention.”
Some crypto-traders posted recommending Kramer to use a hard wallet, as it is more secure. A hard wallet only connects to the internet when the user wants to complete a transaction. In addition, transactions are executed by pushing buttons manually, thereby making it more difficult for hackers to gain access.
This is not the only major event surrounding OpenSea, the platform recently banned Phunky Ape Yacht Club (PAYC) and PHAYC from listing their parody Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, amid their ongoing social media war on Twitter.
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