People Are Buying Expensive NFTs that 'Disappear' Overnight

Vice News reports that many people who spent large amounts of money on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are now finding that the token they purchased has disappeared and are left with little to no recourse.

Vice’s Motherboard reports that many people that recently purchased Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have found themselves unable to access the art that they purchased. Motherboard uses the example of a property manager from Ontario named Tom Kuennen who paid $500 in cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “MooN Ticker” from the anonymous digital art collective DarpaLabs.

Kuennen purchased the NFT through the marketplace OpenSea, which is one of the biggest vendors of NFTs, hoping to resell the digitla token at a later date for a profit. In an interview, Kuenne stated: “It’s like a casino. If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn’t, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

A week later, Kuenne opened his digital “wallet” where the artwork he purchased should be available but instead found a banner that stated: “This page has gone off grid. We’ve got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.”

The artwork that he expected to find had disappeared completely. “There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” he said. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”

Kuennen is not the first to find himself in this situation, over the course of the past few months numerous individuals have reported that their NFTs have gone “missing,” or “disappeared.”

Ed Clements, a community manager for OpenSea, commented on how this could happen, stating: “I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging. The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window.”

When Kuennen purchased the Moon Ticket NFT, there was no JPEG logged onto the blockchain itself, just a certificate pointing to a URL. Clements explained that this URL pointer could be suppressed for a number of reasons, including a violation of a marketplace’s terms and conditions.

Mewny, a pseudonymous developer at cryptocurrency analysis firm eGirl Capital, commented on disappearing NFTs and explained how much is left to the discretion of the platform hosting the NFT like OpeanSea. “Usually OpenSea will either have to render the image from on-chain metadata or retrieve it from a link in the metadata,” Mewny stated. But “in both cases, it can simply choose not to.”

It is also noted that while NFT artworks can be taken down from a marketplace, the NFTs themselves are stored inside the Ethereum cryptocurrency. Meaning that the NFT marketplace can only interact with and interpret that data but cannot edit or remove it. For example, an NFT bought on OpenSea should still be viewable on Rarible, SuperRare, or other interfaces to the Ethereum ledger.