OpenSea administrators can take any tokens minted on OpenSea Shared Storefront

I have been keeping tabs on digital currency/NFT news just out of sheer malicious curiosity. The "positive" news mostly seem to be "company X is trying out NFTs!". The high profiles cases don't seem to end up with a usable product or are outright cancelled Y months later with the whole thing labeledd as an "experiment". The negative news on the other-hand are pretty scarring - insane amounts of theft, bankruptcies, price drops, dead-end ideas, echo-chambers. I hope this keeps up.

The Shared Storefront is OpenSea&#x27;s proprietary NFT contract that artists can use to create for free on. OpenSea will allow you to create NFTs for free using their centralized servers as a temporary backend and they only get minted on-chain if they sell. It&#x27;s understood that the Shared Storefront is controlled by OpenSea. While it&#x27;s a nice feature for beginner artists it is also frequently abused by scams and copyright violators and unoriginal dupes. High quality NFTs issue their own contracts and open source the code.<p>I think they should open source the code for the contract and be transparent about it, but it&#x27;s not surprising they maintain control over it.

I find it really weird that they had to decompile the smart contract.<p>That surprised, me I thought the whole point of these smart contracts were that everyone could see them like the transactions that take place.

There has been a move toward centralization in the NFT space with Opensea and Magiceden marketplaces completely dominating the space, largely to the detriment of projects and &#x2F; or users. One recent example: project royalties are now optional, so projects relying on these royalties from sales have had the rug pulled out from under them.<p>I expect we&#x27;ll start to see some backlash where major new NFT projects build more safeguards into their contracts to try and reel back in some of the control the marketplaces have gained.

This is a bad title on the HN submission. I suspect the title is intentionally designed to capture people&#x27;s attention and mislead them. The article title is much better: <i>Does OpenSea Shared Storefront have a backdoor?</i><p>The submission title does not specify <i>who</i> can take anybody&#x27;s tokens. Anyone who reads the article can see that the author claims that Open Sea <i>administrators</i> can seize anybody&#x27;s tokens, and questions whether it is legal for them to retain this ability. This is much more of a nuanced situation than &quot;omg open sea has a backdoor all your nfts are belong to us&quot;. The author also says that they will write more about this in a follow-up post.<p>I believe the author is correct. This is behaviour pertinent to Open Sea&#x27;s ERC1155 contract (called the Open Sea Shared Storefront), and not their marketplace as a whole.

I guess a back door does qualify as “Open”.