Recent OpenSea delistings

[serenae]

Recently we’ve been seeing a lot more delistings on OpenSea, not just because of this known issue, but also other names that are only [a-z] and not major brand names or anything.

Here’s one recent example, elftoken.eth: https://opensea.io/assets/0x57f1887a8bf19b14fc0df6fd9b2acc9af147ea85/111726360295914849349078979364002314079437476714576294776856643316405564438606

A common thread among these delisted names appears to be the fact that those names were expired and then re-registered.

When that happens, the ETH Registrar Controller will burn the token (transfer to 0x000...), re-mint it, and then transfer to the new owner.

The Etherscan UI already has issues with these names, it’s probably only reading that first transfer in the transaction and ignoring the second one, so it shows the owner of the NFT as 0x000...:

On the OpenSea side, it looks like they have recently changed their “History” section, where they will now usually show a transfer from 0x000... as an “Airdrop” entry. Example: fly.eth

My guess is that in recent weeks, names that are expired and re-registered are triggering some kind of automated delisting bot on OpenSea, and their support staff won’t re-list them because the multiple “Airdrop” entries look suspicious or something. @zadok7 and I have seen many of these support cases recently, and here’s the canned response they always get from OpenSea support:

Thank you for reaching out. I feel sorry that your NFT was delisted and removed from OpenSea. don’t worry I’m here to assist and clear this.

Taking a look at the item’s history, your NFT was delisted for violating our terms of service, meaning it will no longer appear on our platform. I understand that this can be really disappointing.

After looking into the transaction, the NFT was minted from a third party and not purchased on the secondary market on OpenSea. In this scenario, we unfortunately don’t offer any refunds.

We recommend doing research before purchasing an NFT on another website to ensure that the contract/creator of the collection is the legitimate owner of the art.

Please rest assured that you do still own your NFT, even if we aren’t able to display it on our platform anymore. Any delisted tokens (NFTs) purchased will still be in your wallet. You will be able to view delisted ERC-721 tokens on websites like Showtime, but currently, ERC-1155 NFTs are not visible on wallets and websites like Showtime.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding amidst this frustrating situation. Please let me know if I can answer any further questions.

OpenSea Customer Experience

That bit about “the NFT was minted from a third party” is the confusing part, of course it was minted outside of OpenSea, by the ENS .eth registrar controller contract. I don’t know for sure, but maybe they’re being confused by the multiple “Airdrop” entries in the history now for expired/re-registered names.

Anyway this isn’t really a bug on the ENS side which is why I didn’t create a GitHub issue for it. I figured the best thing to do is bring it before the Ecosystem Working Group to get their thoughts on this. Perhaps one of the @Ecosystem_Stewards could reach out and start a conversation with OpenSea to see what’s going on here?

Thanks!

[serenae]

Here’s another OpenSea response, where they cite “copy-minting” as the violation:

[inplco]

Looks like the support staff at OpenSea is out of their depth on this

[zadok7]

Another common thread I’m seeing in all of the de-listed names on OS is MigrateAllLegacy. For instance for identificar.eth
https://etherscan.io/enslookup-search?search=identificar.eth

In last 24 hours owners of these names were also affected:

mylifeinsurance.eth
studio-ghibli.eth
meyerburger.eth
shawnfanning.eth

Each have the MigrateAllLegacy transaction.

fly.eth does not have this transaction, but does show Owner: [Null Address: 0x000…000] in Etherscan. However fly.eth is not de-listed in OS. As @serenae mentioned, this could be a recent change in OS scripts that de-list. Just wanted to point out the legacy migration bit. Not sure if that’s an added factor here.

I found a newly registered name farmhand.eth , This one expired and was re-registered today.

It’s not de-isted on OS: farmhand.eth

Like the others, Etherscan for farmhand.eth shows Owner: [Null Address: 0x000…000]
But again, this one is not de-listed, while Legacy ones have been.

To note, these de-listed names show fine on LooksRare and Rarible, so it seems it’s something with how OS is reading on-chain data about these names and auto-delisting them.

[slobo.eth]

Does anyone have contacts at opensea? I’d be happy to talk through this with them.

[zadok7]

Nice @slobo.eth ! Thanks for taking the lead on it. Maybe someone else will answer with contacts for OpenSea, as I do not have those.

I did want to point out one more case I just found. mitsubishiufj.eth
This one is listed on OS. It also was Legacy, with MigrateAllLegacy in tx history. So I don’t think this is the case, unless something changed recently. However, OS is definitely having issues as the Expiration and Registration of this name is off.

I feel like we’re doing OpenSea’s job on this. lol. However, there are a lot of ENS users that use OpenSea, and naturally sad that their legitimate names are delisted for no reason, with no help given except canned/vague responses by OS support.

[slobo.eth]

Is there a list of all names that were de-listed due to @serenae post?

It would help to understand the scale of the problem.

[zadok7]

I can tell you in the last week or so tickets coming in asking about why their ENS name is delisted from OpenSea has probably doubled or tripled.

It’s also hard to tell which names OS delists for trademark or brand issues. Like the one mentioned above meyerburger.eth is the name of a Solar company, and also an American Journalist apparently. OpenSea never gives a specific reason that I’ve seen when something is delisted, unless it was DMCA maybe.

identificar.eth is not any brand I could find, in fact it just means “identify” in Spanish.

I’ll keep an eye out for more than I’ve listed here.

[serenae]

This is not an exhaustive list, just some I could find in my own recent history:

elftoken.eth
tokenmark.eth
identificar.eth
harmaninternational.eth
universalstandard.eth
meyerburger.eth
alisonwonderland.eth
calvin-klein.eth
xxxporno.eth
zelenska.eth
firstrate.eth

Some like calvin-klein.eth might have been delisted for other reasons, but I can see that name is also an example of a name that was expired and then re-registered.

[zadok7]

@slobo.eth Saw this thread on Twitter today about this. Users reporting there also which names are affected.

musks.eth

My continued suspicion is some changes with how OpenSea is reading metadata. LooksRare and Rarible don’t have this problem and the names display fine.

[slobo.eth]

Without direct access to open sea, we are forced to speculate.

@zadok7

Each have the MigrateAllLegacy transaction.

Do we know if all names with the above transaction were impacted?

We are looking for some pattern that is repeatable otherwise we have an incomplete picture.

I’ll add this to the agenda for the next weekly ecosystem call (Weekly Ecosystem Meeting - London Time Friendly - April 4, 2022).

[zadok7]

@slobo.eth

Do we know if all names with the above transaction were impacted?

No, this one was not mitsubishiufj.eth, it may be only recent ones. This was registered 29 days ago and shows on OS, but fit the same pattern of having MigrateAllLegacy in tx history.

Interesting thing about mitsubishiufj.eth is that OS reports incorrectly the expiration date. I mentioned that above, but take a look:

Maybe once they find out why the expiration date is wrong on these set of names, it could be a clue for them as to why some are de-listed. But like you said it’s just speculation as we don’t know directly what’s happening for sure on their end. These are just clues maybe. Hope they can get it fixed.

[serenae]

Another OpenSea delisting support case from today:

4money.eth

Also was previously registered, expired, and then re-registered.

I’ll just edit this post as I come across more cases.

4/3/22:

fragonard.eth
happywife.eth

4/4/22:

aviationinsurance.eth

4/5/22:

dietdoctor.eth
kikocosmetics.eth

4/6/22:

fineandcountry.eth
clinician.eth
directlinegroup.eth
ensserver.eth
isvip.eth
movebitch.eth
financialgroup.eth
abernathy.eth
japantours.eth

4/7/22:

avvenire.eth
buypower.eth

4/8/22:

fordusa.eth
bitcoinmortgage.eth
defiglobal.eth
juanvaldezcafe.eth
homeshop.eth
tokentracker.eth
thedailymail.eth
southall.eth
financialwealth.eth

4/9/22:

landofnod.eth
aucklandcity.eth
dalianwanda.eth
magicshow.eth
villach.eth
applecalifornia.eth
visitbali.eth
javporn.eth
indepth.eth
bacheloretteparty.eth

4/10/22:

acquitted.eth
healthclinic.eth
italianwines.eth
blockmark.eth
hodophile.eth
sindicato.eth
leonisa.eth

4/11/22:

eisenstadt.eth
blkmail.eth
pierces.eth
weddingbands.eth
cartierwatch.eth
drapery.eth
globaltrans.eth
menswatches.eth
grabber.eth
neighborly.eth
topchart.eth
diepost.eth
sympany.eth

4/12/22:

bogachev.eth
rockabilly.eth

[inplco]

Get the twitter overlords to tweet from ENS or ENS DAO twitter tagging OpenSea? By now, the trend is obvious

[nick.eth]

I’ve spoken to devs at opensea, and this is a race condition issue. When a name is re-registered, OS picks up the mint event and immediately queries our metadata API. But, because the API relies on the graph, which is often a few blocks behind, the API hasn’t yet picked up the event, and returns a 404 for the metadata. As a result, OS concludes the NFT doesn’t exist and delists it.

OS is working on adding a delay to avoid the race condition, and we’ll look into modifying the metadata API so it doesn’t return a 404.

[serenae]

Awesome, thank you for speaking to them about it!

[zadok7]

Seems this issue is still ongoing, but did want to share a success story from a user contacting OpenSea. After receiving what seemed the “canned response” for these delistings, the user politely asked OpenSea to escalate to level two help. They shared what OpenSea responded with to that request:

Hi X,
Thanks for your response. I’m sorry to hear that you’re having issues with your ENS. I understand [how] frustrating that is. In order to best help, I’m going to escalate your case to our level two support team. I want to make sure we can resolve this as soon as possible, and they’ll be able to troubleshoot this with you further."

The user reported their name was re-listed, and received this level two response from OS:

Hi there,
Thank you for your patience while we reviewed your account and ENS domain. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience, this was delisted from OpenSea due to a bug that’s actively being addresses by our Engineers. We’ve gone ahead and relisted the item and I can now see it listed on your OpenSea profile.

So good news on two fronts. OS is actively working to fix this. Secondly, it may be possible to request a higher level of support to get them relisted manually while they work on it. I can’t speak for OpenSea if they will definitely do this, but for this user that worked. Just wanted to share some quick updates here for users still having this issue.

[serenae]

I haven’t checked all the affected names, but it seems like OpenSea has been relisting them. Hopefully it’s all resolved now!

[berrios.eth]

I have to agree with you. I was able to freeze a scammer’s account and certain NFTs that were scammed from me within hours of the event. But I used a senior level contact to whom we shared other contacts. I was able to convince a subsequent transferee to transfer one back to me, but the opensea customer representative handling my ticket wants a notarized statement to release the freeze on the returned NFT, which example is poorly written and shows a lack of understanding of what a notary does (I was a notary). Yesterday, I sent an email to the representative that is legally sufficient for their purposes, so I’ll let that play out before going back to my contact. I hate to use senior-level contacts on low-level employees unless I’m given no choice.