QUADRIGA INITIATIVE
CRYPTO WATCHDOG & FRAUD RECOVERY PLATFORM
A COMMUNITY-BASED, NOT-FOR-PROFIT
UNKNOWN
AUGUST 2021
GLOBAL
OPENSEA
DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS
"The world’s first and largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Buy, sell, and discover exclusive digital items." "Discover, collect, and sell extraordinary NFTs. OpenSea is the world's first and largest NFT marketplace."
"As the first and largest marketplace for Non-Fungible Tokens and Semi-Fungible Tokens, OpenSea provides a first-in-class developer platform consisting of an API, SDK, and developer tutorials. Feel free to browse around and get acclimated with developing smart contracts and interacting with NFT data."
"Fascinated by the [CryptoKitties] movement that was forming, Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah joined early adopter communities in Discord and started talking to users. With the OpenSea beta launch in December 2017, the first open marketplace for any non-fungible token on the Ethereum blockchain was born."
"Valued at $13 billion in a recent funding round, OpenSea has become one of the most valuable companies of the NFT boom, providing a simple interface for users to list, browse, and bid on tokens without interacting directly with the blockchain."
"24px cats! 9900 algorithmically composed unique pixelcats in the original CryptoPunk 24x24 format! Each trait handcrafted! Happy hunting for the special one :)! Not affiliated with Cool Cats NFT."
"Yesterday I was talking about a cute new digital collectable collection on OpenSea that I was considering buying into, noting that there were 10k which had recently sold out and the cheapest ones were getting more expensive by the minute. Tara was sitting across from me at the breakfast table checking it out as well. We talked about how cute they were and sent a few back and forth to look at."
As Tara was getting ready to buy one she asked “wait, why are there only 800 of these, are they still minting them?” "We quickly realized that she was looking at a fraudulent collection that had been named almost identically with only one extra letter, but was coming up first in the search results."
"OpenSea has 2 different and separate kinds of verification. Account level – are you who you say you are, and Collection level – Is this a legitimate project or not? (To sell an NFT on OpenSea you have to make a Collection for it to live in)."
"Collections are verified separately and somewhat arbitrarily. Earlier this year only verified collections turned up in search results. Documents on OpenSea’s site recommended after you create your collection you tweet the link to them or post it in their discord and they would then verify it."
"That got overwhelming quickly and the backlog became insane, so they changed to allow all collections in the search results, but buying from an unverified collection gives you a popup saying that OpenSea hasn’t had a chance to verify it yet. But due to the sheer numbers of listings being added every day you are much more likely to see that popup than not, so it’s become easily ignorable noise – just enough for OpenSea to waive responsibility for people who get scammed."
"Unfortunately it looked like 30 or 40 people had already fallen for the scam while it was active, and for those people there’s no way recourse or way to get their money back." "[B]ecause transactions happen instantly, even if a scam is found pretty quickly the money has already been transferred to the scammer with no way to get it back."
In August 2021, a fraudulent listing on the OpenSea NFT marketplace attracted more than 40 buyers of fake 24px cats NFTs. There is no way for those affected to recover their assets.
OpenSea And The Problem With Verification – Sean Bonner (Mar 21)
@seanbonner Twitter (May 4)
24pxx Marketplace on OpenSea: Buy, sell, and explore digital assets (May 4)
https://opensea.io/collection/24px (May 4)
How OpenSea took over the NFT trade - The Verge (Mar 10)
Dune Analytics (Mar 10)
https://opensea.io/ (Mar 9)
Meet OpenSea | The NFT marketplace with everything for everyone - YouTube (Mar 9)
https://docs.opensea.io/docs (Mar 9)
https://docs.opensea.io/docs/frequently-asked-questions (Mar 9)
https://opensea.io/about (Mar 9)
