OpenSea has said it will stop selling NFTs that it thinks have been stolen. This is to stop scammers and hackers from selling tokens they got illegally.
In a blog post on Wednesday, the company said it is “starting to test a new system” that will mark NFTs involved in suspicious transactions as “under review” and stop people from buying them on the platform.
Anne Fauvre-Willis, OpenSea’s VP of operations, marketplace, and integrity, told Decrypt that the system will look at “a number of industry data sources” as well as how the NFT was moved out of the owner’s wallet and what else was going on in the wallets around the time of the transfer.
If it finds a suspicious transaction, it will send an email to the previous owner of the NFT, giving them the chance to report it as stolen and file a police report using OpenSea’s existing systems. If it doesn’t hear back in seven days, the NFT will be unlocked.
OpenSea used to wait for people to report stolen NFTs so it could manually stop transactions for that item. But because these scams can happen so quickly, the company says that a stolen NFT was often sold again before the victim had a chance to react. Starting in a “limited pilot phase,” the automated system will get more training over the next few months.
OpenSea can only do so much, though. It can’t stop the NFT from being traded on a market that doesn’t have this system. Even though sales volume and number of transactions have dropped sharply over the past year, DappRadar data shows that it’s still the largest NFT marketplace by a wide margin, so the change should at least make it harder to sell stolen apes.
Decrypt says that the company may also share some of what it learns with other marketplaces in the future. Stopping future sales won’t always get you your NFT back, either. This support document says that once a non-fungible token (NFT) has been taken from your wallet, the game is over. The transaction has been written to the blockchain, and there’s almost no way to get it undone without the help of the thief.
So, this system is kind of like Apple’s activation lock. It doesn’t do much to help you get your phone back, but it makes it a lot less appealing to steal in the first place.
In the same way that OpenSea tries to stop things from being stolen in the first place, it also tries to stop people from sharing malicious links on its platform. It does this by using a list of known bad sites and simulated interactions and transactions to automatically find these links. That’s definitely helpful, but the company’s own blog says that most scam links are shared outside of its platform; Discord has a lot of them.
Still, it’s a small step toward more security in a place where scams are still a problem. I’m not sure that trust and safety concerns are, as OpenSea’s blog says, “some of the biggest barriers to wider NFT adoption today.”
According to data from NonFungible.com’s market tracker, the NFT market has mostly stalled, and the number of daily sales is getting dangerously close to where it was before the boom.
