OpenSea, a peer-to-peer marketplace for non-fungible token (NFTs), rare digital items, and crypto-collectibles has accidentally destroyed 43 on them, worth $100 000.
How Did That Happen?
The bug in the OpenSea NFT marketplace occurred when Nick Johnson, the lead developer of Ethereum Name Service (ENS) attempted to transfer one of his NFTs that instead of going to his given personal address, went directly to a burn address, as he tweeted:
Today I accidentally burned the first ENS name ever registered. A short ?.
— nick.eth (@nicksdjohnson) September 7, 2021
After spotting the bug, Johnson tried to patch it up but failed. The NFT auction house, Opensea, fixed the glitch later on before any other gets burned.
We've reached out to the small number of users who were affected by the issue yesterday where sending an NFT to an ENS name sent it to the encoded version of the literal text (e.g. "OS.eth") instead of the associated address. This was a bug we introduced and fixed that day.
— OpenSea (@opensea) September 9, 2021
Can The Lost NFTs be Retrieved?
This might come as a shock, but unfortunately, burning basically means deletion.
Thus, those NFTs will no longer be recovered, moved, or even accessed on the Ethereum blockchain.
Nevertheless, the burn transactions will always remain on the blockchain ledger.
The prices of all lost NFTs totaled 28.44 ETH in value – about $100 000 at the time when that happens.
