TOM KUENNEN’S NFT MYSTERY BY NFT CRITICS
“There was no record of me ever buying it or ever owning it,” said one baffled NFT buyer. “Now there’s zero. My money’s gone.”
Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, purchased an Image worth $500 of a “Moon Ticket” with Elon Musk-theme from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He bought it through OpenSea, hoping to resell it for a profit.
He never got the opportunity to find out. He checked out his wallet where the artwork would be available and was encountered with an alarming banner reading, “This page has gone off-grid. There was a “404 error, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.”
Was it the issue? A hack? Did Kuennen perhaps misunderstand how NFTs work? Why would NFTs go missing? The answer, it turns out, points to the intricate working of NFTs that are often misinterpreted even by the people inclined to sell out large sums for them.
How can an NFT vanish?
When you buy an NFT for as much as an actual house, in most cases, you’re not purchasing artwork or even an image file. Instead, you buy blocks of code that access a piece of media located somewhere on the internet. Here, the trouble began.
Ed Clements is a community manager for OpenSea. He encounters these problems daily. He explained in an interview that digital artworks themselves are not immutably registered “on the blockchain” when a purchase is made. When you buy an artwork, instead, you’re “minting” a new cryptographic signature that, when decoded, points to an image hosted elsewhere.
Clements differentiated between the NFT artwork (the image) and the NFT, the little cryptographic signature that gets logged.
So when Kuennen purchased that Moon Ticket, there was no JPEG logged onto the blockchain. There was just a certificate directing to a URL. Clements explained that the pointer could be suppressed for several reasons, including violating a marketplace’s terms and conditions.
An essential point to restate is that while NFT artworks can be taken down, the NFTs themselves live inside Ethereum. That means the NFT marketplaces can interact and analyse that information but cannot revise or remove it. Unless the linked image hasn’t been removed from its source, an NFT bought on OpenSea could still be viewed on the platform(s), where they are all just interfaces to the ledger.
Missing from the blockchain
For Kuennen, though, this answer was wholly flawed. He was suspicious that his NFT broke OpenSea’s terms and conditions, and he received no correspondence to that consequence. There was neither an email nor a warning.
He said he couldn’t find a record of the token on the Ethereum blockchain, though he could view the transaction; he spent $500 and bought the image. This wasn’t comforting because the signature should still be available even if an NFT artwork has been taken down.
The key to the riddle of Kuennen’s missing NFT record on the blockchain has to do with even more arcane Ethereum minutiae.
The is Mystery finally solved :
In the end, the case of Kuennen’s missing NFT came down to two causes: Violation of Terms of service on OpenSea that resulted in the image being suppressed and an unreadable ERC-1155 standard. It made it unreachable on Etherscan. He then took a look at Kuennen’s Moon Ticket screenshot.
People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing
Atallah recommended that Kuennen link his wallet to a different marketplace, where it might couldn’t be taken down.
Kuennen returned with something of a half-victory. The image was still either being suppressed or was eliminated at the source. Still, Rarible showed that the NFT existed — unlike OpenSea, which plans to replace its impenetrable 404 banners with appropriate notification, said Atallah.
Kuennen seemed a little bewildered. “While I still don’t understand what has happened, at least it is still existing somewhere,” he said via WhatsApp.
He wondered whether there existed any way he could restore the image without having to gaze into the blockchain. Unfortunately, there was no such option. Could he at least fix the link to the image? But where was it even hosted? Was it even hosted? None of this seemed even remotely hopeful. The best bet, he figured, would be to resell it as it is and call it avant-garde.
Huff, finally, a happy ending!
