Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Kevin Rose, a serial entrepreneur going back to 2004's web pioneer Digg, got tricked into giving away a bunch of very valuable NFTs on Wednesday night.
Why it matters: The multi-part scheme that began with a seemingly mundane airdrop, is a reminder of how easily even the founder of an NFT-focused company could be lured into a trap.
Details: On a Twitter Spaces on Thursday, Rose explained that the malicious airdrop was crucial to tricking him into checking out a website, which in turn was designed to trick him into giving up his tokens.
Of note: Rose keeps all his valuable NFTs on a hardware wallet which is normally offline. But he had taken it out to sell a couple of NFTs from his collection, visiting the OpenSea marketplace to authorize the items for sale.
Be smart: An airdrop is when someone sends a token to a known address, often done to promote something. Yet they can end up being valuable.
How it happened: Rose was on a phone call that he was only half paying attention to while he set up his NFT sale. So, he went to the airdrop's website while his hardware wallet was active.
And then: He found a page that seemed to indicate he should just "sign-in," which turned out to be the fatal step. He realized too late that he'd authorized much more than he meant to.
Context: The crucial point here that Rose made on the Spaces discussion was that Memes by 6529 is a very artsy NFT collection. It's not big and famous. You need to be an insider to appreciate it.
We can't know if the attacker knew they were going after Rose himself, but they could see by looking at the NFTs in his wallet that he must have been an insider.
What we're watching: Rose is now the founder of an NFT-focused company called PROOF Collective, best known for creating one of the top collections, Moonbirds.
The bottom line: "It's not lost on me that I'm in a very lucky position to have even had these NFTs in the first place," Rose said during the Twitter Spaces.
