The hacker Monsieur Personne создал поддельные копии Beeple’s most expensive NFT painting, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, to debunk the myth of the uniqueness and security of tokens.
This concerns the forgery of cryptographic proofs of ownership of the original artwork.
The hacker created собственный NFT в блокчейне Ethereum, which points to the same data as the genuine Beeple token. The configuration of the counterfeit NFT’s components, its identifier and transaction history are similar to the original.
The hacker is not the owner of the original token, but appears so to an outside observer. The counterfeit was minted and sent to the hacker’s wallet from the same wallet that minted the original Everydays: The First 5000 Days NFT.
“There are no measures to prevent theft and improper use of such artworks. With my action I want to show how absurd the hype around NFTs is. Using the example of the most expensive NFT I will destroy the misleading concept of its uniqueness and security,” wrote Monsieur Personne.
The token created by the hacker does not threaten the authenticity of the original, but distinguishing it from the real painting will be quite difficult.
“No one can deny that the NFT I created was not actually made on behalf of the artist. The token creator can only promise in words that he will create only one NFT for the digital asset. In fact he can issue it as many times as he wants, in any wallets,” the hacker added.
Monsieur Personne put up nine copies of the counterfeit token for sale. He will later raffle off ownership of the very first counterfeit NFT among buyers.
In March at Christie’s, for $69.3 million. The final bid stood at $60.3 million, with commissions included.
The painting is a collage of thousands of Beeple works published on the internet since 2007.
Later, the identity of the token buyer was disclosed. It turned out to be Vignesh Sundaresan, the CEO of Portkey Technologies and co-founder of the cryptocurrency ATM provider Bitaccess.
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