A hacker or hackers are actively stealing and flipping high-valued NFTs from users on OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT exchange, causing chaos and confusion in the broader NFT community. 

The current mechanism for the hack is currently unknown, but OpenSea placed a red banner at the top of its site Saturday night saying “We are actively investigating rumors of an exploit associated with OpenSea related smart contracts. This appears to be a phishing attack originating outside of OpenSea's website. Do not click links outside of opensea.io.” 

OpenSea is currently requiring users who list NFTs on the site to upgrade to a new smart contract that fixes an issue with inactive listings that was allowing scammers to swipe valuable NFTs from collectors on OpenSea for dirt cheap; some high profile NFT users are speculating now that a malicious actor is phishing people with a fake page designed to look like the one used to upgrade to that contract.

OpenSea did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A discussion about the hacks on Twitter Spaces had more than 3,700 listeners Saturday night. 

Blockchain records show that the attacker was able to transfer numerous NFTs from different users to their address for free. Stolen NFTs included examples from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and several other popular collections. The attacker has already sold some of the NFTs, for example, this NFT from the Azuki collection for 13.4 ETH ($36,380). The attacker's wallet currently contains more than 600 ETH worth nearly $2 million.

There are indications that the hacker is giving some of their ill-gotten goods back. In one instance, the hacker stole numerous NFTs from one user including one valuable BAYC NFT. The hacker returned all the NFTs except the BAYC, which is currently frozen on OpenSea. The attacker's page on the marketplace similarly 404s. 

Security researcher Dan Guido tweeted Saturday night that “the security of web3 platforms depend entirely on wallets with universally poor security UX, and there’s very little the platforms can do about it,” adding that, "in a strange win for transparency," it's currently possible to see which NFTs have been stolen.

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Over the past year, as the NFT space has begun to explode we’ve begun to see a growing number of racist collections—most notably NFTs depicting George Floyd called “Floydies.” This week we saw another project that surely won’t be the last racist NFT project, astoundingly called the “Meta Slave” NFT collection, which featured images of Black people. After predictable and justified backlash, the project has not shut down, it has merely rebranded to also feature “white, Asian, etc.” NFTs.  

The collection, since removed on OpenSea, contained 1,865 NFTs―a reference to the year the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery. Every NFT was of a Black face, priced around 0.01 ETH, and simply named “META SLAVE” and an assigned number. The faces had the hallmarks of being algorithmically-generated, such as surrealy malformed accessories and teeth. All of this felt like a digital slave auction, reinforced by a tweet from the project (captured via the WayBack Machine) claiming that, “In creating our project, we wanted to show that everyone is a slave to something. A slave to desires, to work, to money, etc.” That tweet added that “There will be other collections in the future: white, Asian, etc.”

The project advertised on Twitter and Instagram; both accounts have been deactivated since the rebrand.

The project was criticized for being brazenly racist. The people running it have since oscillated between offering half-baked excuses and posting through the backlash to push its collection out into the world, before deleting its original account, rebranding to “Meta Humans” and including faces from other ethnic backgrounds. 

According to OpenSea, the collection was created by someone going by “Unipic” who at one point, according to their bio, used the now-defunct Twitter handle @UniqueFractal.

Initially, the project claimed to be in support of Black Lives Matter and honored George Floyd. "Hi there! We are glad to inform you that we have launched the first sales of NFT META SLAVE," reads the first tweet from the project on January 25, captured on the Wayback Machine. "This project was inspired by Black Lives Matter and also in honor of George Floyd."

The same day, it offered a different rationale: "With this project, we want to show everyone that we will never forget the victims and suffering of our ancestors, we must remember history so that it does not happen again," reads another tweet captured by the Wayback Machine.  

This is why, of course, it began to list the NFTs captioned with titles such as "Hard Work" with a smiling face and an emoji of a plant, "Smile through pain," "Plunge" with a wave emoji attached, "Blood money,” and "Uncharted fate."

Then, the account pivoted on January 31st and offered the “everyone is a slave to something” rationale. 

Within a few hours, it backtracked again and tweeted: "We apologize to those who have been offended by our project but we are here only with good intentions. Peace to all." Shortly after, the Twitter account announced they would be rebranding the collection to "META HUMAN'S[sic]” on Twitter and on OpenSea. 

Thankfully, the project is not very successful. It’s sold 4 NFTs to 2 addresses thus far, amassing .04 ETH in volume, or $117 at today’s price. It has a Discord with five members currently, some of whom have taken to spamming an image of a pig with poop on its balls.

This, again, is not the first racist NFT project. In December, we saw the FloydiesNFT project attempt to sell collections featuring illustrations of George Floyd in what was obviously both a shameless cash grab and a transparent attempt to troll. The project was removed from OpenSea (although a page still exists there directing buyers elsewhere), and the Floydies are now available on its website where it claims this “is a revolutionary NFT project that aims to immortalize George Floyd on the Ethereum blockchain.” Nevermind that some of the pictures aiming to “immortalize” some of the images depicted Floyd as: an inmate, a burglar, Mao Zedong, wearing a shirt saying “AUTISM” with drooping eyes and drool running down the side of his mouth, and much more.

There’s not much point in trying to scry a deeper meaning here: NFTs, which are currently largely without much use except for theft and attempting to look cool by dropping a nice house’s worth of dough on a JPEG, sit in the middle of a disastrous ecosystem that incentivizes this very sort of behavior.

The Meta Humans Twitter account did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

Over the past few months, a host of startups and projects looking to raise money in novel ways have settled on crypto and NFTs as their solution. Who can forget MoonDAO, which believes it can go from buying a seat on Bezos’ next low-Earth orbit rocket to a colony on the Moon with the help of NFTs, or FrontierDAO, which aims to fund research into commercial spaceflight with NFTs and “explore the alchemy" between art and science?

Exploration Laboratories LLC, or ExLabs, isn't a bunch of crypto traders in a Discord, however. It's an e startup developing asteroid mining tech with staff who previously worked at NASA and SpaceX. ExLabs announced on Tuesday that it is pursuing “unconventional” additional seed funding as it strives to create vehicles that could someday extract resources from space: NFTs. 

In an interview with Motherboard, chief engineer Miguel Pascual and head of operations Matthew Schmidgall emphasized that the NFTs were a side project; they're a means to an end.

"We're an aerospace company first doing an NFT project,” Schmidgall said. "We aren't a company that's built around an NFT project. Our main focus isn't in figuring out how to solidify and corner all of the elements of the NFT ecosystem―we want to be a part of it and help it evolve into a format that actually works and is trustworthy."

Pascual said that the NFTs will both generate revenue and cultivate a community from which talent and ideas could be pulled.

“The whole point of embarking on this side project is to be able to scale our engineering. And so, if talent exists within the community, specifically to contribute to the project on a significant level, we want to speak with those individuals directly,” said Pascual. “We have an opportunity to create some awesome artwork with really talented artists and share that vision for what that's going to be. But really, we just hope to be, you know, inspirational the same way SpaceX has been."

This NFT collection will be the first of three, aiming to let holders "experience what it would be like for humans to be out in space, off the planet, conducting industry research, and mining riches from space." As of right now, the firm has not announced the mint date, price, or token supply. ExLabs will also launch an "Exploration" token on Ethereum and distribute them as rewards for NFT holders. 

“Holders of the first Explorers Club NFTs will automatically become members and get 10 Exploration Tokens per day. The tokens can be redeemed for exclusive benefits including launching the holder’s name into space, advising on future company designs and community decisions, placing art on next-generation task vehicles, and possible ownership of actual asteroid fragments,” the press release reads. “Explorers Club members will be part of a community that supports an important advancement, and will witness the ambitious yet attainable goals of utilizing the limitless resources space has to offer come to life.”

Although it might sound absurd, NFTs and tokens might just be a perfect fit for asteroid mining, which itself is a highly speculative venture. 

The industry's bubble seemed to burst years ago. Major ventures such as Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries once led the hype cycle surrounding asteroid mining, raising tens of millions of dollars and recruiting NASA talent in the early 2010s. Those firms went defunct in less than a decade as they restructured their visions to abandon asteroid mining, were acquired by telecommunications companies, and had their assets sold or released to the public. But ExLabs believe the time is now riper than ever before, due to developments in rocket technology that have already occurred or are underway. 

"A lot of the technology over the past 10 to 20 years has been forced to develop around a smaller payload volume and weight ratio in order to get these task vehicles into space,” Schmigdall said. “And now, with some of the new super heavy lift vehicles that are going to be coming into the market—not the current ones, but you know the next generation, that changes the game as far as what the limitations are around what can be built and spent into space."

Costs have come a long way: since the Space Shuttle first took off in 1981 to the Falcon Heavy launches starting in 2018, the cost to take a kilogram into low earth orbit has plummeted from $65,400 per kilogram to $1,500 per kilogram. Asteroids, however, are not always in low-Earth orbit, and so part of ExLabs’ announcement also said the company is working on “bringing asteroids into a usable orbit.”

In 2013, NASA announced plans for such a mission to pull an asteroid into the Moon’s orbit then have asteroids set foot on it, but it was eventually scrapped in 2017. Some of the developed technology was repurposed for a recent NASA mission to test whether kinetic impact can slightly redirect an asteroid’s motion. 

Still, that doesn’t seem to have deterred Exploration Laboratories from trying to revive that dream again, or from using a new speculative asset to raise funding for the old speculative venture. 

"We're taking web3 to space. Capture a real asteroid with your spot on the #ExplorersClub pre-sale list," the company tweeted in promotion of the coming NFT collection.

In a town hall meeting on Monday aimed at Starbucks workers amid a massive union drive, failed presidential candidate and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz revealed a development that he hoped would excite workers: crypto.

In a clip from a Partner Open Forum held on Monday and shared on Twitter by Jordan Zakarin, a reporter and producer for progressive news outlet A More Perfect Union, Schultz awkwardly asked multiple times if anyone in the audience was a "digital native," and then went back on script and asked if anyone had “followed what has been happening with NFTs" or “participated in investing in NFTs.” The audience laughed and only one brave soul chimed in to say they had invested, but still Schultz was undeterred.

"If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers, that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can't find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz told the room. So, here's the secret: sometime before the end of this calendar year, we are going to be in the NFT business."

In a news release recapping Schultz's statements, Starbucks reiterated that NFTs were on the company's roadmap but didn't provide more detail. A Starbucks spokesperson pointed Motherboard to that news release when asked for more detail about the plan.

Schultz's comments on NFTs come in the context of a speech that also took aim at unionization efforts at companies in the U.S. like Starbucks and framed them as an "assault." 

"Here's where it gets a little sensitive because I've been coached a little bit," Schultz told the room in a clip shared by A More Perfect Union. "But I do want to talk about something pretty serious. We can't ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization."

Also on Monday, Starbucks allegedly retaliated against Laila Dalton—a 19-year-old barista in Phoenix—for her role in the union drive by firing her, progressive news outlet More Perfect Union reported. More Perfect Union has also previously shared videos of Dalton’s managers harassing her for handing out union cards to employees. In March, the NLRB issued a formal complaint against Starbucks for its treatment of Dalton.

Because of regular harassment from managers, Dalton began recording herself whenever they were present—Starbucks claims this is why they fired her on Monday, telling Motherboard that she recorded conversations she was not party to and as a result was violating Arizona’s one party consent law which only protects recordings of conversations so long as you are party to the conversation or have permission of someone party to it.

“A partner’s interest in a union does not exempt them from the standards we have always held,” a Starbucks spokesperson told Motherboard. “We will continue enforcing our policies consistently for all partners.”

The “assault” that Schultz refers to in his town hall encompasses the more than 100 Starbucks stores across 27 states that have filed petitions for union elections since August. In response, the company launched a massive union-busting campaign that quickly backfired. While Schultz took over as chief executive in mid-March after a five-year hiatus, he had been part of Starbucks’ failed PR offensive for months already; in November, Schultz flew out to Buffalo, NY before the first union election to draw parallels between working at Starbucks and Jews trapped in railcars headed for Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. 

In April, More Perfect Union published an investigation where they found that "more than half of the NLRB filings on Starbucks' illegal activities have come in the last month alone." Those activities include surveilling, questioning, threatening to fire or retaliate against, and outright firing unionizing workers.