NFTs worth $100,000 (roughly Rs. 73.4 lakhs) were accidentally “burned” due to a bug in the OpenSea marketplace. Nick Johnson, the lead developer of Ethereum Name Server (ENS), shared the news on Twitter on September 8. He said when he transferred an ENS name, it went to a burn address, meaning it was accidentally sent to an address that nobody controls and thus can no longer be moved or retrieved. The bug has been patched since, but it has brought into light the blockchain technology’s vulnerability and lack of maturity.
In a Twitter thread, Johnson described in detail what actually happened. He said he “accidentally burned” the first ENS name ever registered. The ENS is a service that lets users associate blockchain addresses with domain names to make it easier to identify transactions as easy-to-understand names, rather than complicated blockchain addresses.
Today I accidentally burned the first ENS name ever registered. A short ????.
— nick.eth (@nicksdjohnson) September 7, 2021
The developer said the incident happened when he attempted to transfer an ENS titled rilxxlir.eth to his personal account from an ENS account. He said he had planned to offer the ENS as an NFT — a unique digital token tied to a digital asset. He tried to make the account transfer through OpenSea and discovered the bug. Instead of sending the ENS to his account, it was sent to a mysterious burn address.
He immediately got in touch with OpenSea, when he got to know that he was the “first and apparently only” victim of the bug introduced to their transfer page recently.
A frantic call to @OpenSea later, it transpires I was the first and apparently only victim of a bug introduced to their transfer page in the past 24 hours, which affected all ERC721 transfers to ENS names. Ownership of rilxxlir.eth is now permanently burned.
— nick.eth (@nicksdjohnson) September 7, 2021
Later, he said 30 more transactions from 21 different accounts were also affected. The value of all NFTs lost totalled ETH 28.44 – about $100,000 at the time. As of September 10 (3:09pm IST), Ether price in India stood at Rs. 2.68 lakhs.
It now looks like ~30 transactions from 21 different accounts were affected. CSV here: https://t.co/LyZR8JfrJZ
— nick.eth (@nicksdjohnson) September 8, 2021
In recent months, NFTs gained incredible popularity and set price records. Earlier this month, an NFT project selling a set of eight randomly generated numbers from 0–14 and stored on a blockchain reached a market capitalisation of ETH 10,256 (roughly $40 million/ Rs. 294 crores).