The National Basketball Association (NBA) has revealed that it is suspending the minting of its new collection of non-fungible tokens, dubbed – The Association – after BlockSec detected a major loophole. Less than a day after the league announced the minting of its Ethereum-based non-fungible token (NFT), it recognized the problems with the smart contract that caused the “Allow List” supply to run out prematurely.
The defect
The Blockchain security firm, BlockSec, revealed the identification of a serious vulnerability that could have allowed a malicious entity to mint a large number of NFTs, without paying any tokens. According to the official blog post, the company said the main reason behind the defect is the misuse of signature verification.
This essentially means that the contract does not guarantee that the signature can be used by the user (and only by the user) once. The vulnerability also allowed the attacker to reuse a privileged user’s signature and mint tokens for himself.
The company stated,
“We are surprised how such a vulnerability can exist in a popular NFT project. The whole community must pay more attention to the security of the contract ”.
The attacker reportedly managed to mint 100 NFTs and sell them on the OpenSea market. The latest development shows, once again, the need to evaluate the security of a smart contract.
A Twitter user these,
“What’s even more hilarious about this NBA Associated NFT is that it’s called V2 on OpenSea. This means they created a contract, found an error, and then released V2 with still the simplest exploit possible. Anyone in the NBA who chooses this partnership must be fired ”.
The NFT collection
The NBA first unveiled the launch of its Web 3 project – “The Association” – involving 18,000 non-fungible tokens representing all 240 NBA players assigned to this year’s playoffs. Additionally, 75 NFTs are randomly assigned using Chainlink VRF to each player of the 16 participating teams.
Taking advantage of Chainlink oracles will allow each player’s NFT aspect to automatically alter. Dynamic NFTs will change their appearance based on player performance. In short, more milestones achieved during the 2022 NBA playoffs mean players will see more visual changes in their digital collectibles over the course of the post-season tournament.
