A “massive exploit” on the Magic Eden marketplace led to the sale of over two dozen fake NFTs over the course of 24 hours.
In response to the exploit that led users to purchase fake nonfungible tokens on the Magic Eden website, the marketplace has pledged to refund all users who bought fake NFTs.
A bug in Snappy’s newly implemented “activity indexer” allowed fake NFTs to be listed alongside genuine ones on its Snappy Marketplace and Pro Trade tools, according to a Jan. 4 statement.
The exploit resulted in 25 fraudulent NFT sales across four collections in the last 24 hours, but Magic Eden is still checking whether any more NFTs were affected.
There were two of the affected projects, ABC and y00ts, that were highly priced and popular Solana-based collections.
According to the NFT platform, the issue was resolved by temporarily disabling both tools and eliminating the “entry points” where unverified NFTs could enter.
To prevent unverified NFTs from appearing in users’ browser sessions, it asked them to perform a “hard refresh” of their browser and shut down the purchase of unverified NFTs.
The message said that Magic Eden is a safe place to trade NFTs and that any users who mistakenly bought unverified NFTs would be refunded.
On Jan. 4, Magic Eden first alerted the community to the fraudulent NFTs, citing reports of people buying fake ABC NFTs. They attempted to resolve the issue by adding “verification layers” at the time.
In the wake of the announcement, Twitter users continued to warn of fake y00ts NFTs on the platform. Based on a screenshot taken from ABC creator “HGE,” two sales were worth 100 Solana each, or around $2,000.
DeGods, who created y00ts, also tweeted to its followers that Magic Eden had an exploit that allowed unverified NFTs to appear in the collection.
Magic Eden users have been exposed to two incidents in one week with this latest exploit.
On Jan. 3, pornographic images and images from the television series The Big Bang Theory littered the marketplace.
The company says a third-party image hosting provider was “compromised,” which resulted in the “unsavory images” and assures users their NFTs are safe.
While Magic Eden has faced some challenges recently, it remains the top Solana NFT marketplace. Data from DappRadar shows that its trading volume in the last 24 hours was $4.6 million, which is higher than OpenSea and Solanart.