Todd Kramer, who is an art gallery owner, had his NFT collection stolen from his wallet the last day. OpenSea froze these stolen assets which are valued at around $2.2 million.
NFT marketplace OpenSea has frozen 16 Bored Ape and Mutant Ape nonfungible tokens (NFT) after they were reported stolen yesterday from a NY art gallery operator.
In total, one Clonex, seven Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and eight Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs currently valued at about 615 ETH ($2.28 million) were stolen and are now not able to be traded on OpenSea.
OpenSea Freezes The NFTs
The toddkramer.eth account, which links to the Ross+Kramer Art Gallery in New York, fired off a series of tweets detailing the 16 NFTs that were stolen from his hot wallet and pleading with OpenSea and the NFT community for help. While the NFT community was often unsympathetic to the trader’s plight, OpenSea froze trading on the stolen items.
The freeze on buying and selling the NFTs has some traders decrying a lack of decentralization, one of the cherished aspects of the crypto industry. One Twitter commenter kw.sol said, “Who was able to freeze then? Feels pretty anti-crypto to be asking third parties to do this and ideally they shouldn’t be able to.”
Famed software engineer Grady Booch chimed in about the lack of decentralization in this case when he commented:
“Silly me. And here I thought that the code is the law and that one of the very ideas of cryptocurrencies was the elimination of any possibility of centralized intervention.”
A hot wallet is a type of cryptocurrency software wallet that is connected to the internet, most commonly MetaMask, whenever the device it is installed on is connected.
Kramer tweeted that he lost his collection through a phishing scam that gained access to his hot wallet after he clicked on a malicious link.
He deleted the tweet following the harsh vitriol in the comments.
