The NBA recently announced plans to release an NFT project called “The Association.” Little did they know that a bit of error on their part would jeopardize the entire project.
The NBA, The Association, and The Code Error
The National Basketball Association (NBA) recently announced that it would be launching an NFT Collection called “The Association.” The collection consists of 18,000 assets, and each “The Association” NFT represents a real NBA player in this year’s playoffs. There are 75 NFts of each player from 16 different teams.
The NFTs are supposed to be dynamic so that their value can increase or decrease depending on the real-life performances of the players they represent.
With plans in motion, the NBA launched “The Association” earlier this week. A whitelist made up entirely of the earliest members of the NBA’s discord server would receive one free NFT each.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and what happened instead is that a code error within “The Association” smart contract (the code that allows NFT to be created and traded) made it possible for users to exploit the drop, unfairly mint the NFT and clear out the entire collection in less than an hour.
This mistake in the smart contract enabled the whitelisted users to grant minting access to other wallets that were not on the original allowlist.
In addition to this, the contract did not keep a proper record of the number of mints per wallet. “If a contract was made, it could mint the entire collection in one transaction,” said Captain Defi.
