Tag: opensea

OpenSea Sees Older Mickey Mouse Avatar Become Most Trending NFT, Market Revival Remains Slow

The charm of OG cartoon characters seem to be making a comeback on to the newer generations with a fresh flavour of Web3. At a time when the overall NFT market is experiencing upheaval, NFTs inspired by one particular cartoon character outshone all others on the world’s largest NFT platform, OpenSea. This character is none other than the iconic Disney mascot, Mickey Mouse. A total of three NFT collections modelled after Mickey Mouse emerged as top rankers on OpenSea.

The NFT sector, last year, managed to amass $8.70 billion (roughly Rs. 72,457 crore) in sales, the lowest since 2019’s $3.75 billion (roughly Rs. 31,232 crore). The number of NFT transactions, however, rose to 90,607,554, surpassing the figure of 54,857,850 that was clocked in 2022.

In the backdrop of the market status, NFTs influenced by a very distinct version of Mickey Mouse – that was created to be featured in the 1928 short film “Steamboat Willie” – took OpenSea by storm. NFT artists were quick to create collectibles around this version of Mickey Mouse after Disney, as per US laws, lost claims to it after holding it for 85 years.

On OpenSea, the Steamboat Willie Public Domain 2024 NFT collection secured the top rank. The floor price (lowest price) of the NFTs from this collection is ETH 0.20 (roughly Rs. 39,399), showed a CoinTelegraph report. Meanwhile, Steamboat Willie and Steamboat Willie’s Roverboat secured the second and third rank on OpenSea’s top list with the floor prices of ETH 0.13 (roughly Rs. 25,609) and ETH 0.02 (roughly Rs. 3,939) respectively.

The buzz around NFTs peaked in September 2021 when sales of these digital collectibles managed to amass around $881 million (roughly Rs. 7,344 crore). In September 2023, reports claimed that among the top 8,850 NFT collections by market cap, 18 percent were worthless, and 41 percent saw their prices drop to around $5 (roughly Rs. 415) to $10 (roughly Rs. 835).

Soon after however, a new NFT category – Bitcoin Ordinals along with some collections like Anime-inspired NFT series Azuki, Ethereum NFT projects Pudgy Penguins, Milady Maker as well as Solana projects Claynosaurz and Chads kept the NFT boat afloat.

Findings from cryptoslam.io indicates that there were 4.16 million sellers and 4.97 million buyers of NFTs in 2023.

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OpenSea to Make Royalty Enforcement Tool That Benefited NFT Creators ‘Optional’: All Details

OpenSea NFT marketplace has decided to put a stop to its Operator Filter tool. This decision will not let NFT creators demand royalty fees on secondary sales of NFTs on other marketplaces. While OpenSea has its reasons behind this decision, it sure is bound to affect the creators of digital collectibles who wish to generate income from any sale of their digital artwork. The feature was first introduced in November 2022 by OpenSea to benefit the NFT creator community.

The Operator Filter tool, that will be made optional starting August 31, allowed NFT artists to blacklist those marketplaces that did not enforce royalty charges on secondary buyers.

The marketplace wishes to adhere to the principles of freedom of choice and ownership that the decentralised ecosystem boasts of, by giving buyers also an option to choose if they want to pay royalty charges to the NFT creators or not.

“The Operator Filter depended on support from everyone in the ecosystem to be successful and that just didn’t happen. And perhaps most importantly, the potential applications and utility of NFT technology are too diverse for creators to depend solely on a single business model that only monetises resale,” OpenSea said in its official statement.

NFT collections that enable the Operator Filter tool on OpenSea before August 31 will be able to demand secondary buyers to pay the creators’ preferred fees till February 29, 2024. Starting March 2024, the filter will be optional for these collections as well.

Concerned Web3 community members are pouring their reactions to the situation on X, with many calling OpenSea’s decision a mistake.

Explaining itself, OpenSea wrote in its post, “to be clear, creator fees aren’t going away – simply the ineffective, unilateral enforcement of them.

When OpenSea did mandate royalty charges, it was reportedly instigated by loads of requests to do so from the creator community.

The marketplace, at the time was desperate to balance its finances after monthly sales volume on OpenSea reportedly plunged to $700 million (roughly Rs. 5,500 crore) in June, down from $2.6 billion (roughly Rs. 20,600 crore) in May and a far cry from January’s peak of nearly $5 billion (roughly 40,000 crore).

The platform had launched this feature last year as a “simple code snippet”, which when enabled, allowed secondary NFT sales on marketplaces that mandated royalty charges.

While some creators were happy to be minting some money from their art, OpenSea said it heard from some creators who said, “the Operator Filter limits their sense of control over where their collections are sold, and at the same time may collide with a collector’s expectation of full ownership.”

In addition, other NFT marketplaces like Blur, Dew, and LooksRare found technical ways to go around this filter and still managed to avoid levying creator fees on secondary NFT sales.

These factors combined made OpenSea reevaluate its filter.

“The Operator Filter was meant to empower creators with greater control over their Web3 business models, but it required the buy-in of everyone in the Web3 ecosystem, and unfortunately that has not happened,” its blog noted.

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NFT Scammers Luring Buyers With ‘Gasless Sales’ on OpenSea, Multiple ‘Apes’ Stolen: Harpie

OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace there is, constantly finds itself under threat from notorious cyber actors. A new kind of scam is looming over the visitors of OpenSea, that offers ‘gasless sales’ on the platform and eventually redirects the victims to phishing sites. Built on the blockchain tech, NFTs are digital collectibles that hold financial value and could also be used in metaverses. Web3 scammers are known to have been invading the NFT sector to churn big profits from one act of theft.

Harpie, the anti-theft platform, sounded an alert about this ongoing scam to warn the bunch of OpenSea visitors, browsing for NFTs, as well as buyers, and sellers.

OpenSea has a feature to conduct gasless sales, where NFT sellers can rid their buyers of paying the platform fees, by doing that themselves.

As part of the reportedly ongoing scam, hackers are tricking people to sign an unreadable message. Gasless NFTs are likely to attract first-time buyers signature request.

Users can also set up private auctions with custom prices with these unreadable signatures required for approving gasless transactions.

“Phishing websites will ask victims to sign a harmless-looking “login signature” to access their site. But this login signature is actually a request to private-sale your NFT for 0 ETH to the hacker’s address,” Harpie wrote in a Twitter post.

The platform also claimed that in recent times, multiple ‘Apes’ NFTs, potentially from the Bored Apes Yacht Club collection have been stolen out of OpenSea.

The exact number of NFTs stolen or users affected remain undisclosed.

As of now, OpenSea has not addressed Harpie’s concerns.

This is not the first time, however, that OpenSea has come face-to-face with a hack threat.

In February, at least 32 users of OpenSea lost their holdings worth $1.7 million (roughly Rs. 12.5 crore) to a phishing attack. The company, at the time, had claimed that the attack happened from outside the website, where attackers lured in users to malicious agreements.

In August, the OpenSea decided to involve police officials in theft cases of all magnitudes, rather than on cases only with escalated disputes.

The change was aimed at ensuring that users are safeguarded against the risks of mistakenly buying stolen digital collectibles.



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OpenSea NFT Marketplace Adds Bulk Purchase Feature, Details Here

OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, is now allowing users to list and buy up to 30 digital collectibles in one go. In case of bulk buying, OpenSea will let buyers add up to 30 NFTs, built on the same blockchain, to their cart and finalise the transaction at once. This would not only make the purchase of multiple NFTs seamless, but will also significantly reduce the gas fees deducted on all transactions as a service charge.

For creators looking to list up to 30 NFTs at once will also be able to use this new feature on OpenSea.

The NFT marketplace, launched in December 2017, posted an official announcement on this bulk buy-and-sell feature on Twitter.

In recent times, OpenSea has seen sales volume on its platform nosedive amid market volatility.

According to crypto analytics community Dune data, OpenSea’s trading volume hit a peak of around $5.8 billion (roughly Rs. 46,408 crore) in January. However, trading on the platform saw a steady declined throughout the first two quarters of the year, sliding to $3.1 billion (roughly Rs. 24,805 crore) in May.

A separate analysis by Be[In]Crypto also reveals that Solana NFT volumes also saw a dip in June with sales volume figures of $91.52 million (roughly Rs. 732 crore) in June, down by 64 percent from $261.07 million (roughly Rs. 2,089 crore) in May 2022.

Amid dropping sales, OpenSea has been adding a bunch of new features on the platform.

Earlier in September, the NFT marketplace began ranking digital collectibles on the basis of their rarity. Named OpenRarity, this feature will enable collectors to find legitimately rare digital collectibles, that have been drowning in the sea of NFTs out there.

The NFT market will be a $231 billion (roughly Rs. 18,41,300 crore) behemoth by 2030 and it’s too big a business to be ignored, believes, Tarusha Mittal, COO and co-founder of UniFarm said in conversation with Gadgets 360. UniFarm is a multi-token reward staking programme.

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OpenSea NFT Marketplace to Solely Support Ethereum’s Upgraded ‘Merge’ Version

OpenSea NFT marketplace has announced its allegiance to Ethereum’s upcoming energy-efficient upgrade called the Merge. The platform has stated that no Ethereum forks will be supported on OpenSea in order to ensure all transactions are as smooth as possible. ‘Forks’ is a technical term which is used when a blockchain network splits. OpenSea, which launched in 2017, initially started supporting NFTs that were built on the Ethereum blockchain. Presently, the platform has swelled to incubate over 80 million NFTs. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital collectibles and artworks that are backed on blockchain networks.

Ethereum’s Merge upgrade is slated for release in mid-September, its developers have hinted.

A recent DappRadar report had warned that stablecoins and transactions backed on the Ethereum blockchain could encounter some snags as the blockchain shifts from its energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining model to the energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mining model.

OpenSea posted a public alert on Twitter about its decision to support only Ethereum’s Merge version upon its release.

Earlier this month, stablecoin major Tether and Circle Pay, the issuer of USD Coin, also extended support for the Merge.

While Circle Pay has said that once the Merge has released, it will only use that version of Ethereum for the operations of USD Coin, Tether has decided to start making arrangements to support the Merge in line with its release schedule.

The Merge upgrade is expected to slash Ethereum’s power consumption by 99.95 percent, its developers had claimed in a blog post last year.

Meanwhile, the bug bounty payouts for Ethereum can now go as high as $1 million (roughly Rs. 8 crore), developers of the blockchain have said in a recent update.



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OpenSea Amends Policies to Safeguard Users, Takes Steps to Tacke NFT Theft Situations Better

OpenSea, the online marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), is making amendments to its policies to safeguard its users against the thefts of digital collectibles. The platform has decided to involve police officials in theft cases of all magnitudes, rather than only on cases with escalated disputes. The company has also decided to take measures to simplify the re-sale and re-purchase of stolen items once recovered. The small but significant changes that OpenSea is introducing in its existing frameworks is based on the feedback of the NFT community, members of which suffer when they lose their NFTs or mistakenly purchase those stolen by scamsters and find themselves in legal troubles.

OpenSea, going forward, has decided to re-enable the sale and purchase of stolen NFTs if a police complaint is not registered about the incident within seven days of it happening.

“We’re making it easier for users who reported an item stolen to re-enable buying and selling when they recover the item or determine they should withdraw their stolen item report. For example, we’re finalising details on a simplified process that doesn’t require a notary,” the marketplace founded in December 2017 revealed to its 1.8 million followers on Twitter.

In a series of tweets, OpenSea admitted that the user-trust on the platform has been damaged after certain cases of NFT thefts led to legal consequences for their next buyers and holders.

“It is against the US law to knowingly allow the sale and transfer of stolen items. We do not want to incentivise theft by allowing our platform to be used to help sell stolen items. In some cases, the purchaser who unknowingly bought a stolen item at no fault of their own was inadvertently penalised. This is one of the most difficult issues we face. Please believe we take it seriously and we’ve been actively listening to your feedback on how to tackle it,” OpenSea added.

The platform is looking to automate threat and theft detection, such as blocking suspect URLs earlier.

OpenSea claims to be the largest NFT marketplace in the world. In recent times, the platform has attracted hackers and crypto scammers on its platform.

Earlier in July, OpenSea suffered a data breach after an employee at the platform’s email delivery partner – Customer.io – leaked user data.

In February, the platform lost hundreds of digital collectibles in a phishing attack and incurred losses worth $1.7 million (roughly Rs. 12.5 crore).

In recent times, several popular NFTs from series like Yuga Labs and Moonbirds were struck by hack attacks.

“We care deeply about enabling users to operate safely on our platform. Allowing the sale of stolen items and operating with stolen goods is no sign of a healthy ecosystem but neither is a lack of trust from those of you who got us here. Doing better begins w/ sharing & listening more. We’re committed to improving at both. Thank you for your feedback,” OpenSea noted.

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Celsius Users Under Phishing Risks as Already Troubled Firm Now Faces Data Breach Scandal

Celsius Network has disclosed to its community that it has suffered a data breach, warning users against threats of phishing attacks. An unnamed employee of Celsius’ third-party social media handler Customer.io accessed a list of Celsius client email addresses and transferred those to a third-party. Customer.io handles the market communications for both, Celsius as well as OpenSea. In June, OpenSea also reported a data breach. At the time, Customer.io had informed Celsius that its user data was safe.

After firing the concerned employee, Customer.io conducted internal analysis through the month of July, and later warned Celsius about the data breach incident.

Celsius, the crypto lending firm is now in the process of informing its users about this breach, asking them to be alert and not share sensitive information with unverified strangers.

It looks like tough days are nowhere near an end for Celsius. The company, struck by the recent crypto slump, has filed for bankruptcy.

As per Celsius, only a list of its client email addresses saved with Customer.io was leaked by the now terminated engineer, and no other information is expected to have become part of the breach.

Customer.io has also published a blog post addressing the incident.

“Despite the many precautions taken to protect our customer data, the employee’s role enabled specific access to these email addresses. This employee has been terminated, all access has been revoked and we have reported this employee to law enforcement,” the company wrote.

In June, when OpenSea NFT marketplace suffered the data breach, its users had complained about being bombarded with emails that resembled phishing attempts.

Phishing is a category of cyber-attack in which specific emails are directed at potential victims in an attempt to lure them into clicking malicious links, or download malware to mine or steal their crypto holdings.



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OpenSea NFT Marketplace Suffers Data Breach Leaking Email IDs of Users: Here What You Need to Know

OpenSea, the largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace by trading volume, has suffered a data breach after an employee at the platform’s email delivery partner – Customer.io – leaked user data. In a blog post on Thursday, the marketplace said that an employee of Customer.io “misused their employee access to download and share email addresses – provided by OpenSea users and subscribers to our newsletter – with an unauthorised external party.” According to OpenSea, all customers who have shared their email with the platform in the past should assume they have been impacted by the breach.

In a blog post, OpenSea’s head of security Cory Hardman said that an employee of Customer.io, OpenSea’s email delivery vendor, abused their access by downloading and externally sharing customer data.

“If you have shared your email with OpenSea in the past, you should assume you were impacted,” he wrote. “We are working with Customer.io in their ongoing investigation, and we have reported this incident to law enforcement.”

The company further warned customers might face phishing attacks — attempts by cybercriminals posing as credible institutions with the aim to obtain sensitive information — by using a domain name similar to the official “opensea.io,” such as “opensea.org” or “opensae.io.”

Hardman also shared a set of safety recommendations that would help defend against phishing attempts advising them to be suspicious of any emails trying to impersonate OpenSea, not to download and open email attachments, and to check the URLs of pages linked in OpenSea emails.

Users are also urged never to share or confirm their passwords or secret wallet phrases and never to sign wallet transactions if prompted directly via email.

Some customers took to Twitter to share screenshots showing that OpenSea contacted them by email to inform them about the breach.

A similar incident occurred in March, when hackers breached third-party marketing vendor HubSpot to target large crypto stakeholders. NYDIG, Pantera Capital, BlockFi, Circle and Swan Bitcoin were among the affected companies.



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