Key Takeaways
- Hackers have stolen a whole bunch of NFTs from the Arbitrum NFT market Treasure.
- Treasure builders shortly froze buying and selling to keep away from additional losses.
- Because the incident, most of the hackers have return the NFTs to their rightful house owners.
Share this text
The Arbitrum-based NFT market Treasure has been hacked. Builders froze buying and selling after a whole bunch of NFTs from the Smol Brains and Legions collections have been stolen.
Treasure Market Hit by Exploit
The Treasure market has suffered an exploit.
Treasure, the most important NFT market on the Ethereum Layer 2 resolution Arbitrum, was hit by an assault early Thursday morning, leading to a whole bunch of NFTs being stolen. Hackers discovered a solution to purchase NFTs listed on the Treasure market with out paying for them. Treasure builders shortly reacted by freezing buying and selling on {the marketplace} to keep away from additional injury.
Treasure is the hub for NFTs within the TreasureDAO NFT ecosystem. As an alternative of utilizing Ethereum or stablecoins to purchase and promote NFTs like on OpenSea, Treasure solely lets customers transact utilizing MAGIC tokens, the ecosystem’s native forex. In response to blockchain safety firm PeckShield, an attacker discovered a solution to manipulate the worth of listed NFTs on Treasure, permitting them to purchase NFTs for 0 MAGIC tokens.
PeckShield estimates greater than 100 NFTs have been stolen from {the marketplace} earlier than builders froze buying and selling. One handle seems to have stolen 17 pixel-art monkeys from the Smol Brains assortment. If bought for the unique itemizing costs, these NFTs would have value a purchaser over $1.4 million price of MAGIC tokens on the time of the hack. Since Smol Brains and one other widespread assortment referred to as Legions are at present probably the most priceless and actively traded NFTs on Treasure, they seem to have borne the brunt of the exploit. The most cost effective Smol Brains usually commerce for round $9,500 at present.
As information of the exploit circulated on-line, the worth of the MAGIC token dropped sharply, bottoming out at a 33% loss earlier than posting a slight restoration. MAGIC is at present buying and selling at $3.38, down 11% from pre-exploit ranges.

In response to the exploit, TreasureDAO’s GoudaGaarp took to Discord to reassure the Treasure group. “Deepest and sincerest condolences for these impacted by the exploit at present,” they wrote. GoudaGaarp went on to elucidate that TreasureDAO had frozen the Treasure market pending a full code overview. TreasureDAO may also take an energetic position in distributing NFTs again to their rightful house owners and plans to suggest a number of remediation choices to make sure customers are made entire.
Nonetheless, because the scenario progressed, it appeared that most of the hackers had a change of coronary heart. A Twitter person posting below the deal with @Br0keboy96 pointed out that transaction knowledge from Arbiscan exhibits dozens of NFTs stolen from Treasure being returned to their rightful house owners. Presumably, the hackers realized that the stolen NFT couldn’t be cashed out because of TreasureDAO freezing buying and selling and sure planning to blacklist all stolen NFTs.
As NFTs have boomed in recognition, exploits and hacks focusing on NFT marketplaces have elevated. Final month, a hacker utilizing phishing emails was in a position to steal roughly thousands and thousands of {dollars} price of NFTs from unsuspecting OpenSea customers. Whereas DeFi protocols and cross-chain bridges have sometimes been widespread targets for hackers, as non-fungible tokens develop in worth and recognition, extra assaults towards purposes like Treasure are seemingly.
Disclosure: On the time of scripting this piece, the writer owned ETH and several other different cryptocurrencies.