We’ll note right away that we’re talking about the NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club series. It is one of the most famous collections of non-interchangeable tokens, which was a real hit in 2021.

According to The Block, almost no one was interested in these tokens until early spring, but then there was a real hysteria around them. First of all, it’s the price. According to the OpenSea platform, the minimum price of a representative of this series today is 89.96 ether. At the current exchange rate, the amount translates into 241 thousand dollars, which means that the owners of such NFTs are clearly wealthy people.

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFT-collection figures

However, some of them have managed to lose precious tokens – and for pennies at that. That’s exactly the kind of story that happened to Timothy McKimmie.

How NFT tokens are stolen

Timothy is a Texas resident who, until recently, was the owner of a token from the Bored Ape Yacht Club series. And although his NFT could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars, the token was only sold for 0.01 ETH or the equivalent of $26.


The problem was caused by a bug in the code of the OpenSea trading platform. It is the most popular platform for unique token transactions. Despite this, it often goes offline and faces criticism from users.


As a result, McKimmie has filed a lawsuit against the company in federal court in Texas. He claims that he is still the rightful owner of monkey number #3475. According to Timothy, he did not put the token up for sale. It was stolen, and an NFT “buyer” for 0.01 ETH soon resold it for 99 ethers, the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars.

Timothy clarified that Monkey #3475 ranks 14th on the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s overall rarity list. At the same time, it is much rarer than the copy that Justin Bieber purchased the day before for the equivalent of $1.3 million. As a result, the victim of the incident believes that the amount of damage exceeds a million dollars.

McKimmie himself is confident that the exchange’s developers were aware of the existence of a bug that allows NFTs to be bought far below their market prices. Here is the relevant quote from the plaintiff, cited by Decrypt.

Instead of shutting down the platform and fixing the security issues, the defendant continued to operate. By doing so, it put users and their NFT tokens at risk. All in order to continue to collect a 2.5 per cent commission on each transaction.

BAYC’s NFT collection

In doing so, McKimmie approached representatives of the company. They said they were “actively investigating” the existing problem.

With the lawsuit, Timothy wants to push for better security on OpenSea.

The plaintiff has brought this action to protect the interests of NFT holders who reside in different countries around the world and use the defendant’s platform.


Recall that this is not the first problem OpenSea has had due to the presence of a bug. For example, in January 2022, a token holder from the same Bored Ape Yacht Club collection lost it in exchange for the equivalent of $1,700. In this case, the hacker also exploited a vulnerability in the platform and got rich. Read more about the story in a separate article.


Jimmy Fallon with an NFT photo from the BAYC series


We think the OpenSea developers really need to take care of their own security system. After all, the trading volumes of the platform are huge, which means that the earnings of the company's representatives are huge as well. Therefore, the need to spend a portion of the proceeds to improve the platform and maintain its competitiveness seems absolutely obvious - especially in the current environment. We would like to believe that investors will still see some improvements.