Someone was able to mint over 1,000 NFTs from The Sevens contract, here’s how they did it

The buzz in the NFT world today was around a new project that dropped today called The Sevens. The project features 7,000 unique NFT collectibles with references from pop culture, anime, games, memes, movies and more. I think the art looks pretty slick myself and it reminds me quite a bit of 0N1 Force which also features a side profile character, here’s an example of what one of The Sevens’ NFTs looks like:

Owning a The Sevens NFT gives you access to a treasure hunt their launching in the metaverse (which sounds pretty darn cool) along with exclusive access to merch drops. Today was the launch and the cost to mint was 0.07 ETH plus gas.

As we’ve now seen happen over and over again, when a hot new project drops, gas gets high, ridiculously high, and Twitter starts to fill up with Tweets about the ensuing gas wars. In the case of The Sevens though, along with gas wars a whole different problem emerged.

Before mint The Sevens made it clear, only one NFT was allowed to be minted per transaction. Sounds simple enough right? Well, someone minted over 1,000 The Sevens NFTs and paid very little in gas.

How did they do it? That’s what this post is about – read on if you want to know.

So I’m not going to go too deep into smart contracts and how they work but I think that is probably a good topic for a future blog post. For now I’ll keep it simple – here’s what happened in bullet point form.

• The Sevens contract had a limiter in it that prevented anyone minting on the website or directly from the contract to only be able to mint one NFT per transaction
• Someone, or some group of people was able to go around this limiter by not minting on the website, and not minting through The Sevens contract – instead they minted through their own contract
• The contract that this person (or group of people) used did call a function from The Sevens contract – a mint executor function that, like it sounds, mints an NFT
• Essentially, this person (or people) just called that function over, and over, and over again, over 1,000 times – and manages to do it all in one transaction, and at a lower gas fee than everyone else

Now I know what you’re thinking – how can we stop this from happening in the future? Well there’s one project that’s already one step ahead, Sneaky Vampire Syndicate (SVS) who I wrote about this morning on NFTInvesting.io. SVS has was thinking ahead even before all of this funkiness broke out today by building a system to prevent bots from buying from the contract period. A lot of devs have been pretty impressed with what SVS is doing and I think they might end up setting a new standard for mintings going forward.

Okay, now you know the basics of what happened today, if you want to do a deeper dive and look at the code, I highly recommend giving this thread from @0xBender a read. Today is a good reminder that these are still the early days, as with anything in life, it’s all about learning and improving over time. This was a good lesson for all NFT creators today and I think the industry will be better because of it.