The special thing about crypto-assets is that you can keep them completely private in an independent wallet.
The downside is that you are responsible for their security, which sometimes goes wrong.
Beetlejuice, via Dune Analytics, has listed the amount of capital that has been alienated from Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFTs and the results are staggering.
130 Bored Apes and 268 Mutant Apes
According to the dashboard designed by Beetlejuice on Dune Analytics, a total of 130 Bored Apes and 268 Mutant Apes have been identified as stolen.
In practice, this means that the owners of the NFTs have contacted OpenSea to identify them as stolen. The value of those 398 NFTs comes to a total of more than 18 million euros with the current bottom prices.
The floor price for a Bored Ape NFT at the time of writing is 92 ether, which already brings the total for the 130 Bored Apes to 11,960 ether. Mutant Apes are currently going for a bottom price of 18 ether, bringing the total stolen with the 268 NFTs to 4,824 ether. Together, that comes to an ether value of 16,784 Ethereum. Please note that this is only about the Bored Ape and Mutant Ape collections.
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However, the Bored Ape and Mutant Ape collections are not the only ones where tokens have been alienated for large amounts.
There have also been 153 Azuki NFTs gone, 202 CloneX tokens and 70 Moonbird. At today’s rock-bottom prices, that adds another 6.76 million in stolen wares to the total. With that, nearly 25 million euros worth of NFTs have been stolen from half of the top 10 collections on OpenSea.
OpenSea’s policy
OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace in the world and has a policy of freezing stolen tokens on the platform. This means that they can still change hands on the blockchain, but OpenSea no longer recognizes that ownership.
Some merchants like the popular Bored Ape collector “Franklin” point out that it is still possible to use other marketplaces like LooksRare.
This issue also immediately exposes the shortcomings of NFTs. Many users are not able to manage the security of their wallets themselves. This raises the question whether in some cases it would not be better to have NFTs traded on a centralized platform.
After all, what is the added value of decentralization in this kind of project? In principle, a Meta or Twitter would also be reliable parties to manage the NFTs.
Abusing the policies of OpenSea
Another criticism of OpenSea’s policy and power is that it is ultimately difficult to determine whether an NFT is actually stolen. You can, in theory, sell your NFT and then tell OpenSea that the picture was stolen. Franklin even writes out an entire plan for this on Twitter.
In any case, it is clear that NFTs are a relatively new phenomenon, for which a lot of things still need to be worked out. That in itself is not surprising, because with the rise of bitcoin there were also a lot of problems with exchanges that could not be trusted.
For example, look at the collapse of Mt. Gox, where creditors are now only getting some of their bitcoin back after eight years.
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