OpenSea Denies Hack and Bug Allegations, Claims Issue is Related to UI

cryptonews.com:

Major non-fungible token (NFT) platform OpenSea has denied hack allegations, saying that yesterday's issue was related to user interface (UI) design.

"This is not an exploit or a bug – it’s an issue that arises because of the nature of the blockchain," the OpenSea spokesperson told Cryptonews.com.

OpenSea detailed that the issue arises when users create listings for their NFTs and then transfer the listed NFTs to a different wallet without canceling the listing. The platform added that listings do not automatically cancel and also cannot be canceled by OpenSea.

"OpenSea cannot cancel listings on behalf of users. Instead, users must cancel their own listings," OpenSea said, adding that it is "working on a number of product improvements including a dashboard where they can easily see and cancel listings" to address the problem.

The platform added that,

They "have been actively reaching out to and reimbursing affected users," and they "have not communicated broadly about this issue because we did not want to risk bringing it to the attention of bad actors who could abuse it at scale before we had mitigations in place."

OpenSea said that they have taken measures to prevent such incidents from happening again: they have changed the default listing duration from 6 months to 1 month, and have also added a dashboard that shows all inactive listings and gives users an opportunity to cancel each listing with a single click.

As reported, on Monday, security and data analytics company PeckShield tweeted that OpenSea seemed to be experiencing "a front-end issue." Some users also argued that exploiters were able to buy NFTs for old listing prices, below the price floor.

Analytics firm Elliptic reported the issue as a bug yesterday. They