Diamonds Are Forever. NFTs? Not Always...
One of my favorite, personalized NFTs is broken. Bummer! Here's how you can protect yourself from getting rugged like I did.
I experimented with a lot of NFT projects early on. One that I enjoyed was SelfMadePunks. It's like the famous CryptoPunk collection, but you could customize it to look like you. This was great because I wanted to link it to my Twitter profile.
After a few minutes, I minted this handsome fella and shared on Twitter.
The resemblance is uncanny, don’t you think? But here is where the trouble began. At the time, I didn’t realize that many NFTs (over 40%) aren’t using web3 storage. In laymen’s terms, they are pointing at web2 websites (which can go away) vs web3 storage (which should be around permanently).
Worse, the smart contract wasn’t uploaded to Etherscan, so marketplaces like OpenSea banned it. Boo…
The final nail in the coffin? If you try to visit the website, MetaMask now flags it as a phishing website.
What does this all mean? Well it means I paid $100 for a custom, immutable profile picture… and all I got was this lousy JPEG that I have to drag around manually.
How Could I Have Avoided This?
At Atomic Form, we released a tool called Atomic Scan. It’s the fastest way to score an NFT for risk. How’d my SelfMadePunk #146 do? Not so well!
So any NFT from this collection receives a High Risk warning. Why? Because you can see the token and media URLs are pointing to a .com website. And if you press further onto the contract verification, you will see that Etherscan doesn’t have the source code listed. What dos this mean? You should steer clear of this project, because any NFT minted on this contract could break.
Mine is basically broken. It was supposed to be my forever profile pic. Alas.
And its not just me. Of the 1 billion NFTs in existence, 400 million are at risk of disappearing.
Be careful out there. Use Atomic Scan if you’re buying (or holding) NFTs!