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People Can’t See Some NFTs or Crypto Wallets on Twitter After OpenSea Goes Down
A Thursday outage hampered MetaMask's ability to automatically display new NFTs, which is dependent on OpenSea.
OpenSea, one of the most popular marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), announced a "database outage" on Thursday. As a result, a number of services that rely on OpenSea's APIs, including the popular crypto wallet MetaMask, are having difficulty displaying NFTs.
"We're caching that data so their outage doesn't wipe the wallet," said MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay. "We keep track of how many NFTs the user has in their wallet." Because of the OpenSea outage, we are currently not auto-detecting new NFTs sent to the user's wallet, though users can always tell the wallet about NFTs they have by manually entering their addresses."
"Because we use OpenSea to detect new NFTs, the outage would only affect NFTs minted during the outage." Users can continue to manually add NFTs to our wallet, and this only affects NFT auto-detection," Finlay explained. "Auto-detection (the thing that isn't working) is a feature that we're going to make opt-in anyway to improve user privacy, so privacy advocates may prefer the current behaviour."
In other words, because OpenSea is down, some NFT owners who recently purchased tokens may be unable to view their expensive JPEGs even in their crypto wallet.
"We are experiencing technical issues that are causing a site outage." "Teams are investigating right now," the company wrote around 9 a.m. ET. As of this press, OpenSea had released an update stating that "a fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the issue." "Programmatic access is still restricted."
Some are using this situation to argue that the NFT market and the so-called web3 are not as decentralised as their supporters claim.
Jane Manchun Wong, a security researcher who specialises in reverse engineering popular services and apps to identify unreleased or upcoming features, discovered that Twitter uses OpenSea's API to display NFTs in an unreleased feature. So, now that OpenSea is down, Twitter is unable to display the NFTs.
"I just think there are too many platforms that rely on OpenSea." And it becomes a single point of failure, especially since OpenSea has been unreliable recently," Wong told us.
A request for comment from OpenSea and Twitter was not immediately responded to.
Earlier this month, Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal, criticised supporters of web3, the idea that the internet is moving towards a new era of decentralisation based on cryptocurrencies and blockchains, pointing out that the crypto world is currently more centralised than many would like to admit.
Marlinspike explained in a viral blog post that he conducted an experiment to demonstrate exactly what he meant. He created MetaMask, an NFT that displays differently depending on the market it's seen on and always looks like a poop emoji in users' wallets.
"MetaMask doesn't do much; it's just a view onto data provided by these centralised APIs," Marlinspike explained. "This means that if you remove your NFT from OpenSea, it will also be removed from your wallet." It doesn't matter that my NFT is indelibly recorded on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which started returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!"
This is essentially what is happening now that OpenSea is down. To be clear, users still "own" a unique string of characters—or hash—that demonstrates to the world that they "own" their expensive JPEGs, and most users will be able to view their NFTs just fine thanks to MetaMask's caching workaround. Others, however, will be unable to see new NFTs in MetaMask until OpenSea is restored.
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By Crypto PiratesA Thursday outage hampered MetaMask's ability to automatically display new NFTs, which is dependent on OpenSea.
OpenSea, one of the most popular marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), announced a "database outage" on Thursday. As a result, a number of services that rely on OpenSea's APIs, including the popular crypto wallet MetaMask, are having difficulty displaying NFTs.
"We're caching that data so their outage doesn't wipe the wallet," said MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay. "We keep track of how many NFTs the user has in their wallet." Because of the OpenSea outage, we are currently not auto-detecting new NFTs sent to the user's wallet, though users can always tell the wallet about NFTs they have by manually entering their addresses."
"Because we use OpenSea to detect new NFTs, the outage would only affect NFTs minted during the outage." Users can continue to manually add NFTs to our wallet, and this only affects NFT auto-detection," Finlay explained. "Auto-detection (the thing that isn't working) is a feature that we're going to make opt-in anyway to improve user privacy, so privacy advocates may prefer the current behaviour."
In other words, because OpenSea is down, some NFT owners who recently purchased tokens may be unable to view their expensive JPEGs even in their crypto wallet.
"We are experiencing technical issues that are causing a site outage." "Teams are investigating right now," the company wrote around 9 a.m. ET. As of this press, OpenSea had released an update stating that "a fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the issue." "Programmatic access is still restricted."
Some are using this situation to argue that the NFT market and the so-called web3 are not as decentralised as their supporters claim.
Jane Manchun Wong, a security researcher who specialises in reverse engineering popular services and apps to identify unreleased or upcoming features, discovered that Twitter uses OpenSea's API to display NFTs in an unreleased feature. So, now that OpenSea is down, Twitter is unable to display the NFTs.
"I just think there are too many platforms that rely on OpenSea." And it becomes a single point of failure, especially since OpenSea has been unreliable recently," Wong told us.
A request for comment from OpenSea and Twitter was not immediately responded to.
Earlier this month, Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal, criticised supporters of web3, the idea that the internet is moving towards a new era of decentralisation based on cryptocurrencies and blockchains, pointing out that the crypto world is currently more centralised than many would like to admit.
Marlinspike explained in a viral blog post that he conducted an experiment to demonstrate exactly what he meant. He created MetaMask, an NFT that displays differently depending on the market it's seen on and always looks like a poop emoji in users' wallets.
"MetaMask doesn't do much; it's just a view onto data provided by these centralised APIs," Marlinspike explained. "This means that if you remove your NFT from OpenSea, it will also be removed from your wallet." It doesn't matter that my NFT is indelibly recorded on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which started returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!"
This is essentially what is happening now that OpenSea is down. To be clear, users still "own" a unique string of characters—or hash—that demonstrates to the world that they "own" their expensive JPEGs, and most users will be able to view their NFTs just fine thanks to MetaMask's caching workaround. Others, however, will be unable to see new NFTs in MetaMask until OpenSea is restored.
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