OpenSea, the world’s largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, is investigating the extent of the losses suffered by its users following a phishing attack.
The company confirmed the cyber attack over the weekend and today in a statement posted on Twitter, OpenSea announced its team has been working around the clock to investigate the specific details of the phishing attack.
“We’ve narrowed down the list of impacted individuals to 17, rather than the previously mentioned 32. Our original count included anyone who had interacted with the attacker, rather than those who were victims of the phishing attack. The attack does not appear to be active at this time. There has been no activity on the malicious contract in 15 hours,” says OpenSea.
NFTs have become popular across the globe in recent months, with expensive items such as real estate, digital artwork and music being ‘tokenised’ and sold online.
An NFT is a secure digital file which validates ownership, and is stored on the blockchain system, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus is not interchangeable.
The cyber attack on OpenSea comes as the blockchain-based cryptographic trend is increasingly drawing the interest of South African companies.
Globally, NFTs have been touted as a new frontier in the use case of blockchain technology to monetise digital creative content, according to research firm GlobalData’s report: Towards next-generation asset class: Can NFTs outlive hype as new gold of crypto economy?
In SA, while the NFT market falls behind global counterparts, multiple NFT projects were unveiled in the country in the second half of last year, showing the growing local interest in the new technology.
SA ranked in 12th place out of 20 NFT markets in 2021, based on research conducted by fintech firm Finder.
Despite being ranked outside the top 10, the local NFT market remains buoyant, as evidenced by recent activity in the sector.
First, Momint, a local online marketplace that allows artists to auction, sell, trade and display their art as NFTs, made its debut in May.
The platform enables South African creators – filmmakers, artists, musicians and sports people – to showcase and monetise their work and sell it directly to fans using either normal currency or crypto-currency.
Another South African NFT marketplace, NFTFI, is also now allowing users to put up their NFT assets, like art, as collateral for a loan, or offer loans to other users on their NFTs. The start-up has a total loan volume of more than $12 million on its platform so far.
In November, the country pioneered the first rhino horn NFT auction, raising funds to protect rhinos.
Share