Popular non fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea suffered an API outage on Thursday, causing problems for multiple sites including Metamask crypto wallet that use it to display NFTs. Touted as the largest NFT marketplace, you can find digital art, there are collectibles including game items, domain names, even digital representations of physical assets at OpenSea. Essentially, the platform is like an eBay for NFTs with millions of digital assets organized into hundreds of categories.
According to an app researcher and Twitter user Jane Manchun Wong, the website was “laggy” on Thursday, with the page occasionally returning a ‘504’ error.
The company confirmed the outage and said that it is experiencing technical issues leading to a site outage. “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the issue. Programmatic access remains disabled,” the company wrote on its status page. To put it simply, some owners who just bought their tokens may not be able to see their expensive NFTs even in their crypto wallet.
Around 11:30 UTC, all the programmatic access to the API was fully restored. “We know how important a reliable site with minimal downtime is to our community, and are working quickly to address this area in a number of ways, including expanding our engineering team to more than 200 people by the end of this year, re-architecting OpenSea for scale, and reducing our customer support times significantly,” the OpenSea spokesperson was quoted as saying by ZDNet.
The NFT marketplace surpassed the all-time high of $3.42 billion set in August 2021 to establish a new all-time high, surpassing the $3.5 billion mark in Ether trading volume, as per data from Dune Analaytics. On Sunday, OpenSea witnessed its trading volume hit an all-time high of $261 million. And in January alone, OpenSea set $169 million in trading volume for each day.
It should be noted that BAYC NFTs are the most popular ones available on OpenSea, a report by CoinTelegraph said. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a popular collection of 10,000 unique bored apes created by Yuga Labs has generated more than $1 billion in total sales amid celebrities flocking into the non fungible tokens (NFTs) bandwagon.
Meanwhile, the NFT space has earlier faced ridicule for its security issues, and the BAYC has had some notable recent thefts. NFT collector Todd Kramer based out of New York said that his collection of sixteen BAYC NFTs worth $2.28 million (Rs 16.94 crore approx.) was “hacked.”
