Popular Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, Opensea has come under heavy fire for the blacklisting of some major NFT collections valued at an astronomical price of $27 million.

Many users of the platform have taken to social media to express their anger and discontentment with the sudden blacklist of NFTs that they own which has also included NFTs from some of the biggest NFT communities in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

When Opensea blacklists an asset, the said asset is temporarily marked and will be prevented from being traded until the blacklist is removed. Most times that assets are blacklisted, it is because the original owner has reported that the NFT has been stolen from their wallet. This is to prevent the asset from being sold and lost completely.

Many of the users complain that Opensea arbitrarily marks and blacklists some NFTs without proper tracking and investigation. This means any person in the ecosystem could simply have reported any NFT to have been stolen and it will be frozen out of purchase until due diligence is observed.

Another issue that many users have been complaining about is that sometimes, Opensea flags an NFT as being stolen long after the theft had occurred. By this time, the NFT must have changed hands severally and when it is flagged, an unsuspecting buyer who had paid rightfully for the NFT now becomes the victim of the thief’s actions.

In July, a Twitter user had twitted at Opensea, asking for an explanation as to how an NFT he purchased 88 days ago was flagged as stolen. Several other affected users camped in the comment section stating that they were in the same situation and we’re doing all they could to get their NFTs unflagged to no avail.

Some of the tokens and wallet transactions of leading NFT collections like CloneX, Azuki, Moonbirds, Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC), Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), and Bored Ape Kennel Clun (BAKC) were flagged as stolen or suspicious by Opensea.

Based on the available data, the total amount of cryptocurrency in blacklisted assets on the platform was about 24,000 ETH which is worth a little over $27 million at today’s Ethereum price.

That figure is also calculated according to the current floor price of the flagged NFT collections. m Affected users have asked the NFT marketplace platform to be more transparent while going through the process that marks the NFT as being stolen.

Some other NFT marketplaces obey Opensea’s blacklisting of an asset but Looksrare doesn’t do so. Assets that are stolen on Opensea can be sold on Looksrare most times and it has been a regular occurrence in the NFT ecosystem.

Featured image source: cryptopotato.com