What went wrong with the low-priced sale of NFTs? OpenSea introduces new feature to manage sales listings

The NFT trading platform OpenSea recently reported that many well-known NFT projects such as BAYC and MAYC have been sold at significantly lower prices than their floor prices. Why were these NFTs maliciously bought at prices below their market value when there was no sales information displayed on the front-end page of OpenSea? What remedial measures has OpenSea come up with to address this issue?

NFT Sold Without Authorization

In fact, the issue of OpenSea NFT being sold at a low price was discovered and detailed by Twitter user cap10bad at the end of last year. The following is the process of how the problem occurred.

When users list an NFT on OpenSea and later decide to delist it due to personal reasons, they need to pay a considerable delisting fee. This fee is associated with Gas Fees required to modify the smart contract. Some users find this expense unreasonable, especially for low-priced NFTs. Therefore, users have found a method to delist NFTs on OpenSea without paying the delisting fee. They transfer the originally listed NFT to another wallet to delist it and then transfer it back to the original wallet.

However, this method has its flaws. Even though the originally listed item cannot be seen on the front-end page of OpenSea after delisting, it can still be interacted with through OpenSea's API. Rarible, another NFT trading platform, can prove this by displaying some item listings through OpenSea's API.

After cap10bad listed their NFT on OpenSea and went through the wallet transfer as mentioned above, the NFT has been delisted from OpenSea.

However, upon checking Rarible, the item was still listed for sale. It will only be removed once the listing period expires or through a smart contract delisting.

cap10bad mentioned that this was not a webpage bug, but the fact that OpenSea doesn't inform users that the item is still listed for sale is the main issue.

Substantial Losses for Users

According to OpenSea's transaction records, several NFTs from well-known projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club were sold at prices far below the floor price. These sales seem to have originated from a user named jpegdegenlove.

jpegdegenlove acquired NFTs at low prices and immediately sold them at higher prices, resulting in profits across various projects totaling approximately 347 ETH, around $830,000.

OpenSea's Remedial Measures

As the situation escalated, OpenSea finally addressed the issue. Since OpenSea cannot unilaterally change the contract to delist NFTs for users, they introduced a new listing management feature and categorized listed NFTs into the following:

• Active: NFTs that have been listed and are still in the user's wallet
• Inactive: NFTs that are still listed but have been transferred out of the original wallet. If transferred back to the original wallet, they will be automatically relisted.

Through this categorization, users can clearly see which NFTs have been listed but not delisted. By utilizing the inactive list to delist NFTs, users can prevent such accidental sales from happening again.