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On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association (NBA) launched 18,000 Ethereum-based NFTs.
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Poor coding led to users exploiting the drop by cleaning out the 18,000 NFT collection.
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In response, the NFT has increased the collection from 18,000 to 30,000 to accommodate fans.
It has been a great 2022 for NFTs and the sports world. Team and play interest in NFTs and the metaverse have surged as sports look to capitalize on Web3 to drive fan engagement.
U.S sports franchises, including the NFL and the NBA, have been at the forefront of innovation. Both have seen success with their NFT marketplaces, providing incentives for more activity to celebrate major sporting events.
On Wednesday, the NBA launched ‘The Association,’ an 18,000 NFT drop to celebrate the NBA playoffs.
Exploit Hits the NBA’s Hyped NFT Collection ‘The Association Launch’
On Thursday, news hit the newly launched NBA Discord of an exploit. Last week, the NBA launched ‘NBAxNFT,’ a discord to provide a platform for the NBA community to engage in Web3 chatter.
With 59,592 members, the Discord has come in handy as the NBA looks to manage the situation.
On Thursday, the NBA announced the exploit on NBAxNFT,
“We recognize the issues with the smart contract which caused the Allow List supply to sell out prematurely. We apologize for this situation and are currently identifying the Allow List wallets that were not able to mint as a result.”
The Association collection was on offer to early members of NBAxNFT via an “Allow List.” Early Discord members could link an Ethereum wallet to the Discord to reserve one NFT per wallet.
A coding issue resulted in individual users minting as many as 100 NFTs and then selling them on the OpenSea marketplace.
At the time of writing, there were 17,093 NFTs from The Association collection on OpenSea, with 9,100 owners and a floor price of 0.193 ETH.
About an hour after launch, the NBA hit pause on the drop and announced that it would increase the number of NFTs in the collection to 30,000.
The Discord’s scam-alerts page, however, suggests that the NBA was still grappling with scammers overnight. The Discord provided scam website addresses that had announced the resumption of the mint.