Kevin Rose's NFT Wallet With 40 High-Value Collectibles Hacked
The Proof CEO was the victim of a phishing scam that drained millions of dollars worth of rare tokens, according to one estimate.
Jan 25, 2023 at 7:42 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/TNTVTMKH7FH3VAFXQPOCBPBYFQ.png)
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In a tweet, Rose advised his 1.6 million followers to avoid buying any Chromie Squiggles, a generative art NFT project by Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon, aka Snowfro.
The floor price for a Squiggle on secondary marketplace OpenSea is 13.3 ETH, or about $20,700 at the time of writing. Rarer Squiggles NFTs have even sold for up to 945 ETH, or $2.8 million.
It appears that an effort has been made to flag and retrieve the stolen NFTs from OpenSea. One Twitter account estimated that the wallet contained millions of dollars worth of rare NFTs.
In a follow-up tweet later in the day, PROOF vice president of engineering Arran Schlosberg explained that Rose was "phished into signing a malicious signature that allowed the hacker to transfer a large number of high-value tokens."
He went on to explain that when they realized what had transpired, they attempted to use theft prevention tool Revoke Cash, though the scammer has already bulk-transferred tokens out of Rose's wallet. According to the Etherscan link provided, the scammer made off with 40 NFTs, including one Autoglyph; 25 Chromie Squiggles; one QQL Mint Pass; one Admit One pass from gmoney; one Cool Cat NFT; one The Currency NFT by Damian Hirst; one Quantum Key; and several OnChainMonkeys.
Schlosberg said that assets owned by PROOF were "unaffected and not at risk," because they require multiple signatures to move. He added that the team was working with anti-fraud teams from OpenSea and Ledger "and are considering all avenues, including legal."
Rose's hack is the latest in a series of high-value exploits targeting well-known Web3 figures. Earlier this month, Nikhil Gopalani, chief operating officer of Nike (NKE)-owned NFT project RTFKT, and CryptoNovo, a prominent NFT collector, lost NFTs estimated to have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to scammers.
UPDATE (Jan. 26, 02:25 UTC): Updates with additional details from Kevin Rose and Arran Schlosberg on the nature of the scam.
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Rosie Perper was the Deputy Managing Editor for Web3 and Learn, focusing on the metaverse, NFTs, DAOs and emerging technology like VR/AR. She has previously worked across breaking news, global finance, tech, culture and business. She holds a small amount of BTC and ETH and several NFTs. Subscribe to her weekly newsletter, The Airdrop.