The National Basketball Association (NBA) revealed pausing minting of its new non-fungible token collection, dubbed – The Association – after a major loophole was detected by BlockSec. Less than a day after the league announced the minting of its Ethereum-based non-fungible token (NFT), it recognized the issues with the smart contract that triggered the “Allow List” supply to sell out prematurely.
The failure
Blockchain security firm, BlockSec, has revealed that it has identified a severe vulnerability that could have allowed a malicious entity to mint large numbers of NFTs, without paying any tokens. According to the official blog, the company said that the main reason for the flaw is the incorrect use of signature verification.
This essentially means that the contract fails to ensure that the signature can only be used by the user (and only the user) once. The vulnerability also allowed the attacker to reuse a privileged user’s signature and mint tokens to themselves.
The company said,
“We are surprised that such a vulnerability can exist in a popular NFT project. The whole community needs to pay more attention to contract security.
The attacker reportedly managed to mint 100 NFTs and sell them on the OpenSea marketplace. The latest development depicts, once again, the necessity of evaluating the security of a smart contract.
A Twitter user mentioned,
“What’s even more hilarious about this NBA Associated NFT is that it’s called V2 on OpenSea. Which means they created a contract, found an error, then released V2 with still the most basic exploit possible. Anyone in the NBA choosing this partnership needs to be fired.
The NFT Collection
The NBA had first unveiled the launch of its Web 3 project – “The Association” – which involves 18,000 non-fungible tokens representing all 240 assigned NBA players in this year’s playoffs. Furthermore, 75 NFTs are allocated randomly using Chainlink VRF to each player from the 16 participating teams.
Using Chainlink Oracles will allow each player’s NFT appearance to change automatically. Dynamic NFTs will change appearance based on player performance. In short, more achievements in the 2022 NBA Playoffs means players will see more visual changes to their digital collectibles, throughout the post-season tournament.
