Ali NFT blind boxes turn into "transparent boxes," technology failure leads to ridicule

Original Title: "Ali NFT Blind Boxes Turn into 'Clear Boxes' Technical Glitch Sparks Community Mockery"

Original Author: Kyle, Hive Tech

The rise of the NFT wave has allowed major IPs to find new markets. On January 19, the official social media of the well-known domestic anime IP Ali announced its entry into the NFT field, launching the "Ali & His Friends" series of NFTs.

On February 15, after the initial whitelist distribution and hype, 10,000 Ali series NFT blind boxes officially went on sale, each priced at 0.1 ETH. On the OpenSea trading market, the price of a blind box soared to around 0.2 ETH.

According to the rules, blind boxes can only be opened after all are sold out. However, community members quickly revealed that the series of NFTs had a technical flaw, allowing users to access the corresponding metadata and image information of the blind boxes through backend code logic without opening them.

According to technical analysts, the blind boxes turned into "clear boxes" mainly because the official team exposed backend code logic and the administrator backend address, while the blind box metadata was placed in a public folder accessible to anyone. This claim has not been responded to by the official team, which has not publicly explained the reason, but stated in the community's Discord that they would scramble the leaked metadata and rearrange the NFT rarity.

As Ali is a genuine domestic IP, this technical "glitch" incident has raised doubts about domestic projects. According to previous plans for Ali NFTs, it was set to build the Aliverse virtual universe and related games around "Ali and His Friends," but after this low-level technical accident, many people expressed skepticism about whether this goal could be realized.

Technical Flaw Turns Ali NFT Blind Boxes into 'Clear Boxes'

With a cute, warm, and childlike personality, the comic character Ali, who has always believed in fairy tales, has accompanied many through their youth. As the NFT wave surged, this classic domestic anime IP also chased the trend and entered the NFT market.

On January 19 of this year, Ali's official social media announced the launch of the "Ali & His Friends" series of NFTs. According to the official website, this series consists of 10,000 pieces, featuring unique avatars of "Ali and his friends," including Ali, Big Bear, Peach, Shadow, Mika, and others. Each character's avatar has different outfits, and their rarity varies.

Two Ali NFT Avatars

After this announcement, a large number of Ali fans and NFT enthusiasts expressed their interest in collecting on social media, and the follower count of Ali NFT's official Twitter quickly grew to 109,000. According to its NFT sale rules, only users who completed multiple tasks to obtain a whitelist were eligible to purchase through official channels on the release day.

On February 15, Ali NFT blind boxes officially went on sale, each priced at 0.1 ETH. Many long-awaited whitelist users purchased blind boxes immediately. According to the rules, blind boxes could only be opened after all were sold out.

Of course, the blind boxes purchased by whitelist users were already listed on trading markets like OpenSea. On February 16, the floor price of Ali NFT blind boxes on OpenSea was about 0.2 ETH, a 100% increase from the official sale price.

Just as blind box holders were eagerly anticipating which NFT they would unveil, an unexpected incident occurred. According to community feedback, the "Ali & His Friends" series of NFTs experienced a technical flaw during the presale process, allowing users to access the corresponding metadata and image information of the blind boxes through backend code logic without opening them.

The mystery of the blind boxes was lost, turning them into "clear boxes," a situation that is particularly rare in NFT sales history. Additionally, some users reported that there were spelling errors on the previous Ali NFT official website, with "Connect wallet" misspelled as "Collect wallet."

According to Twitter user 0xZdm's analysis, the blind box leak exposed multiple vulnerabilities in Ali NFT's technology. First, the official debug mode was not turned off, directly exposing backend code logic; second, the official used a version of ThinkPHP released five years ago, which likely had penetration vulnerabilities; third, the official website exposed the administrator backend address; fourth, the metadata that could only be seen after opening the blind box was directly placed in a public folder, accessible to anyone at any time. This user tagged the Ali NFT official team, stating, "Please stop this behavior of using Web 1.5 technology to harvest Web 3.0 leeks."

The exposure of these issues caused a huge uproar, leading to chaos in the Ali NFT community, with many demanding an explanation from the official team. At this time, an ID suspected to be an administrator in the Ali NFT official Discord group sent a message saying, "Brothers, hurry up and ship out," sparking further controversy.

Subsequently, the official team responded in the community, stating that the account that made the "ship out" comment had not been used for a long time and was suspected to have been hacked. Additionally, the Ali NFT official team did not publicly explain the reason for the information leak, but in the Discord community, the team stated that they were actively rectifying the website and would scramble all previously leaked metadata and rearrange the NFT rarity.

Community Criticism of Domestic Projects as 'Unreliable'

Although the official team promised to address the vulnerabilities, even if they could resolve the technical issues, the negative impact would be hard to eliminate.

In the community, a user angrily exclaimed, "Domestic projects are the most unreliable, just thinking about harvesting, what kind of ** technology is this?" This user believed that the Ali NFT team used subpar technology to harvest people's hard-earned money.

Such a low-level technical flaw is indeed difficult to avoid criticism, and since Ali is a genuine domestic IP, it further leads to skepticism about domestic projects.

Ali was created in 2006 by Hans (Xu Han), a graduate of Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts, starting from online and magazine serialization, and later publishing fairy tale picture books and animated shorts. To date, Ali-related publications have surpassed 3 million in sales, with tens of millions of fans online.

After Ali became popular, many diverse virtual products (such as stickers) were derived, making it a content supplier for the internet. At the same time, Ali's peripheral products have emerged endlessly and successfully crossed over with multiple brands, becoming a pioneer in the commercialization of local anime images. It can be said that Ali is a typical well-known domestic IP.

Ali Series Anime Characters

Although the official team of Ali NFT is anonymous, many people believe that the Ali NFT is operated by a domestic team. The occurrence of this major technical flaw has made users scoff at domestic projects. Some fans who love Ali also expressed their dissatisfaction, saying, "Such a cute character, please don't ruin it, and the project team shouldn't bring shame to Ali."

Some community users believe that the Ali NFT project team needs to quickly fix the vulnerabilities and successfully complete the NFT distribution to mitigate the negative impact. Furthermore, the project team should reflect on this incident and demonstrate a pragmatic and efficient style in their future plans to regain external trust.

In fact, in Ali NFT's plans, issuing 10,000 NFT blind boxes is just one part. According to the official website's roadmap, after the NFT release, the team will start building the Aliverse virtual universe and related games. In Aliverse, the relationships between Ali and his friends will be expressed intuitively through games, and there may even be collaborations with other cartoon characters.

Previously, on February 13, the Ali NFT project reached a strategic cooperation with the MoonDAO community to jointly carry out the "Ali Moon Landing Plan," exploring outer space together (MoonDAO had previously successfully booked multiple commercial space company "Blue Origin" tickets for near-Earth orbit rocket flights in 2022); on February 9, Ali NFT also collaborated with the sandbox metaverse project ALPACADABRAZ to seek collaborative construction of the metaverse.

These collaborations and subsequent plans originally provided a huge imaginative space for the story of the Ali NFT project. However, after the technical issues were exposed, many questioned whether the official team had the capability to develop the Aliverse virtual universe and games. In the midst of a trust crisis, whether Ali NFT can resolve the current issues and realize the conceptualization of the metaverse as planned has become a suspense.