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Recently an artist friend of mine got scammed on Rarible. The Scammers put up his original artwork for a reserve price after minting 22 copies of which 2 were sold. My friend came to know of this after he noticed that 2 copies had already been sold.

He is currently in the process of drafting a DMCA complaint for taking down the scammer's profile.

Since he wanted to sell the artwork in the future (by himself), he was wondering if it would be possible to UNMINT the existing NFT from the Blockchain, and somehow make it look like it never existed in the first place.

In any case, I'd love to know what can be done when awful shit like this happens.

Deba
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Technically speaking it is possible: the opposite of minting a token is burning it, meaning that it is removed from the blockchain (only the transactions that minted and burned that token will remain there as a kind of log).

However, minting and burning functions are optional in the NFT standard definition (in your case, it is probably ERC1155 if you have multiple copies of a token).

Moreover, when we talk about collectible NFTs, such as artwork, the goal is to make them unique, so it doesn't make much sense to have a burn function in the smart contract that created them. Therefore, it is likely that you can't do anything with those couple of tokens already sold; who has the token ownership, has full control on it -and nobody else has.

I guess Rarible will be able to precise what can or can't be done. It all depends on how the smart contract to manage their NFTs are designed.

Sergi Juanati
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  • Thank you very much! I've been trying to get in touch with Rarible's team for a while. Let me bug them about the smart contract so we can all learn what can or can't be done. Will try to update any significant progress here. – Deba Mar 12 '21 at 16:20