Making Sense of OpenSea's PR Problem
It's Not A Crisis...Yet
OpenSea has a PR Problem on its hands. And, while there’s not an immediate and simple fix, there’s a way out for the organization. But it’s got to be much more nimble.
You May Have Heard About a Phishing Attack
It made news on a few of the sites and a quick Google search for “OpenSea Phishing Attack” gives you a snapshot of what went wrong.
The simple answer for what went wrong: don’t click on any suspicious links. Internet security 101. Those who had their NFTs stolen had responded to an email that appeared to be from OpenSea but was fake.
Move on to the next thing, right?
But What’s A ‘Wyvern?’
You’d think this next part comes from the pharma industry, and that the above could have some unpleasant side effects, like pain in the perineum. (Actually a side effect of one drug and the drug is used for diabetes, I believe, so…well, I don’t even want to know.)
But Wyvern is the smart contract protocol, built on top of Ethereum, that is used by OpenSea to process transactions.
If you have a collection (or two, or three) on OpenSea, you may have heard something about needing to migrate that collection; thus the phishing attack, because something that involves moving stuff from one place to another almost always gets the hackers involved.
Wyvern is cool. However, it appears to come with a few side effects: confusion, malaise, apathy, heart palpitations. Hovering over the address bar to make sure you’ve got the correct site. Looking at the transaction request and scrolling all the way down to see a bunch of code. Googling “Wyvern OpenSea Legit” to find out whether or not to proceed.
In Typical OpenSea Fashion…Color Us Confused
Migrating appears to be easy. And no gas cost or transaction fees.
Great, right?
But a lot of this could have been alleviated with some open and honest communication from OpenSea HQ. Get out in front of the potential issue before it becomes an issue, tell people clearly stuff like “watch out for scammers” and, probably most vital, “there’s a site called Wyvern and it’s the protocol of choice and here’s why.”
Instead, we got this email two days before the migration period started:
And another one on the day of, with a link you can click.
But what about Wyvern? Shouldn’t we be told that it’s a trustworthy platform? (I mean, you can pay pretty close attention to NFTs and not know what that platform is. Why does it have access to my Metamask? When did I authorize this? Legitimate questions.)
Par for the Course
After receiving a different email from OpenSea — and yes, I checked the link and got the secured site and all of that — I saw that a listing had expired and went in to relaunch the listing. But more confusion ensued.
Business — and NFTs are a business, people — comes down to a few things, really. Make it easy to work with you. Bring people value. Explain things clearly.
OpenSea seems to be failing at most of this. And, with a host of competitors chomping at the bit, it’s gonna take some real effort to start succeeding: it’s not easy to work with them, they don’t bring a ton of value — besides being the first mover — and they sure are obfuscating.