Following an attack on one of its service providers, the Magic Eden marketplace saw some NFTs replaced with explicit images or scenes from The Big Bang Theory. A patch has since been applied to fix the problem
A surprise for NFT owners on Magic Eden
Yesterday, some users of the Magic Eden non-fungible token marketplace were surprised to discover that their NFT images had been replaced. While some were treated to scenes from The Big Bank Theory, others saw the original images overshadowed by photos with explicit characters.
Many collections were affected without apparent distinction. In reality, this is not a Magic Eden hack per se, and the affected NFTs are safe.
The problem came from a third-party service on which the platform caches NFT images to improve the user experience by displaying them more quickly. It was this service provider that was attacked, and was therefore sending the wrong images back to NFT owners. Magic Eden explains that a fix was quickly applied, and that all you had to do was refresh your browser afterwards and everything would be back to normal:
Hey guys our image provider, a 3rd party service we use to cache images, was compromised. Your NFTs are safe and Magic Eden has not been hacked. Unfortunately you might’ve seen some um, unsavory images. Make sure you do a hard refresh on your browser to fix it.
– Magic Eden (@MagicEden) January 3, 2023
The problem of storing NFT content
While this relatively funny episode fortunately has no consequences, it does raise questions about the intrinsic value attributed to non-fungible tokens. For example, would the floor price of the Bored Ape Yatch Club (BAYC) collection still be 75 to 80 ETH, depending on the source, if all their artwork disappeared?
And for good reason: most of the time, only the smart contract that identifies the NFT is really decentralised, but its content, whether audio, video or even photographs, is often stored on centralised servers. A flaw in these servers could then, in a way, “expose” the NFTs, no longer allowing them to display this original content.
This is one of the problems of this sector, which is still in its infancy, and which some projects are seeking to resolve. This is the case, for example, of PROOF, the originator of the Moonbirds collection, which is working to develop solutions to host its NFTs completely on-chain.
