After the continued NFT hacks frenzy, the Ethereum blockchain-based virtual world, Sandbox announced the onboarding of the online threat detection company, BrandShield. Amid the ongoing NFT winter due to the bearishness in the wider crypto market as well as numerous rug pulls, the voluntary move to prioritize investor protection may give the Sandbox a head start into the up-and-coming Web 3.0 evolution.
The Sandbox’s chief operations officer, Sebastien Borget told CoinDesk that “in the open metaverse, users should be able to enjoy their true digital ownership rights and have new ways to create store, and trade value while having fun rather than having to worry about online threats”.
He added,
“With its ability to monitor and protect against these attacks, BrandShield is a strategic partner to help identify faster and take down phishing attacks and various online threats from brand impersonators and bad actors”.
NFT Hacks Impact Volume Stability
From NFT marketplace giant, OpenSea’s discord hack to BAYC’s ApeCoin airdrop suffering from a flash loan attack worth $1.5 million in ApeCoin tokens (APE), the NFT arena became prone to multiple exploits this year. Additionally, attackers commenced a hacking spree over NFT projects’ discord servers, with the leading project — the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT falling prey to three exploits in the first half of 2022.
According to the Chainalysis report titled — ‘NFT Transaction Activity Stabilizing in 2022 After Explosive Growth in 2021’, this year saw stark fluctuations in NFT transaction volume from 2021 to 2022. While the report ascertained a continuation of 2021’s explosive growth of the NFT sector in 2022 as well but in parts.
Where January experienced spikes in transaction volumes, the market movement turned a downward trajectory in February and then began to recover by mid-April again, most of which was heavily caused by scams and frauds in the sector.
Furthermore, Crypto Twitter recently unveiled a list of NFT Discord hacks in just a month, which triggered a wave of fearmongering. According to the list, 70 Discord channels, including those belonging to major projects like BAYC, RTFKT, and Cool Cats, were exploited in May. The tweet highlighted that “26 of the 70 discords were compromised through the Mee6 Bot”. Mee6 is a Discord bot that, apart from connecting other social media platforms to discord, allows admins to automatically give and remove roles and send messages.