Why NFTs on Magic Eden are inadvertently showing porn, ‘Big Bang Theory’ images

Some users of Magical Edenthe biggest Solana marketplace, saw some curious pictures on the platform in the last day instead NFTs they tried to see — including pornographic images and stills from the TV series “The Big Bang Theory.”

Now the marketplace is blaming a hacked image buffering service for the brief mix-up. Magic Eden, which also supports NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon, tweeted late Tuesday afternoon that “a third-party service” used to cache images had been compromised. Users began tweeting about the problem late Monday.

“Your NFTs are safe and Magic Eden has not been hacked,” the marketplace tweeted. “Unfortunately, you may have seen some um, unsavory pictures. Make sure you do a hard update on your browser to fix it.”

The announcement came after various users tweeted about unexpectedly seeing nude photos and images from the TV series that began on Monday. A video shared by a Twitter user shows “Big Bang Theory” images flashing in place of their own NFTs for a brief moment before the artwork itself appears as intended.

“What the hell is going on, why is my 5 year old boy watching porn JPEG on [the Magic Eden] website,” Twitter user SolProfessor565 tweeted on Tuesday.

A Magic Eden representative told Decrypt shortly after the tweet announcement that the startup, valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022, only became aware of the situation early this afternoon and implemented a solution within an hour. However, some users still saw the unexpected images and needed to hard refresh their browser, so the statement was issued.

The company does not believe it was specifically targeted via the hack on the third-party provider, a representative added, which Magic Eden believes affected other sites as well. The NFT startup would not name the image caching partner due to security concerns.

An NFT is a blockchain token that represents ownership of a unique item, including digital goods such as artwork, collectibles, and video game items. Magic Eden is the dominant player in the Solana NFT market, and has gradually expanded to include other platforms as well.

There have been previous examples of actual NFT artwork being hosted on centralized web servers, which can cause problems if a server goes offline. In this case, however, it appears that the Magic Eden site itself experienced the problem due to an attack on an external service provider, and that the NFTs themselves were ultimately unaffected.