OpenSea Freezes $2.2M of Stolen Bored Apes

NFT marketplace OpenSea has frozen 16 Bored Ape and Mutant Ape nonfungible tokens (NFT) after they were reportedly stolen yesterday from a New York art gallery operator. In total, one Clonex, seven Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and eight Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs currently valued at about 615 ETH ($2.28 million) were stolen and are now not able to be traded on OpenSea.

The toddkramer.eth account, which links to the Ross+Kramer Art Gallery in New York, fired off a series of tweets detailing the 16 NFTs that were stolen from his hot wallet and pleading with OpenSea and the NFT community for help. While the NFT community was often unsympathetic to the trader’s plight, OpenSea froze trading on the stolen items. The freeze on buying and selling the NFTs have some traders decrying a lack of decentralization, one of the cherished aspects of the crypto industry. One Twitter commenter kw.sol said, “Who was able to freeze the n? Feels pretty anti crypto to be asking third parties to do this and ideally they shouldn’t be able to.”