- A bug on the OpenSea NFT platform has seen around $100,000 worth of NFTs lost
- The bug affected those using the ENS service and withdrawing their NFTs to their address
- The bug was patched within 24 hours
There are some that argue that buying NFTs is like burning money, but a bug on NFT platform OpenSea has taken things one step further and accidentally causes users holders to burn $100,000 worth of NFTs. The bug was discovered by Nick Johnson, lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a Ethereum wallet and address naming platform, who accidentally killed his own NFT by sending it to his ENS name. And Johnson isn’t alone – a total of 42 NFTs have been effectively destroyed in the 24 hours before the bug was fixed by OpenSea.
ENS Address Issues Led to NFT Burnings
Johnson posted a tweet thread on the mishap yesterday, stating that the trouble began when he tried to withdraw an NFT from OpenSea to his ENS nick.eth, only to find that the NFT ended up going to an Ethereum address that was nothing to do with his ENS. Johnson spoke to OpenSea who informed him that there was indeed a bug in their system and that he was the “first and apparently only victim of a bug introduced to their transfer page in the past 24 hours”.
Today I accidentally burned the first ENS name ever registered. A short 🧵.
— nick.eth (@nicksdjohnson) September 7, 2021
This turned out to be far from the truth however, as Johnson discovered when he did a little digging. He found that rather than him being the first and only victim of the bug, his was in fact one of 42 NFTs known to have been lost by the bug, which was contained within code designed to convert ERC721 tokens to ENS names.
OpenSea Admits Bug
The cumulative floor of the NFTs lost stands at over 28 ETH, meaning that the loss equates to some $100,000 at current prices. OpenSea said they had “reached out to the small number of users who were affected by the issue” and have fixed the bug, not that that will satisfy the NFT holders.
We’ve reached out to the small number of users who were affected by the issue yesterday where sending an NFT to an ENS name sent it to the encoded version of the literal text (e.g. “OS.eth”) instead of the associated address. This was a bug we introduced and fixed that day.
— OpenSea (@opensea) September 9, 2021
