Vigilante Recon NFT Bounty
Honest Protocol & Vigilante Recon NFT
The crypto ecosystem is constantly plagued with scams, hacks, and malicious activity and the NFT space has had its fair share of it. The influx of bad actors does not seem to be reducing anytime soon and for that reason Honest Protocol stepped into the scene by analyzing various NFT projects and assigning scores for fairness. The team realized that web3 needed a trust and curation protocol for Ethereum where third-parties can directly plug in to access a suite of trustless labels aimed at guiding users to make safe choices.
As part of their auditing process, the team at Honest learned that NFTs could be used to perpetrate malicious activities such as logging the IP address of any user who views an NFT. Vigilante Recon NFTs were then developed to prove that indeed NFTs can collect user data without the user’s consent. Before we go deep into how Vigilante Recon NFTs work, let’s look at mint and holder data.
How It Works
First of all, Vigilante Recon NFTs are not like your regular NFTs. They are dynamic in nature, meaning that they evolve/update over time depending on how they are viewed and the geo location they are viewed from. Vigilante Recon NFTs are living maps that are updated by mapping the location of the viewer in real time. The image below shows an example of how I viewed Vigilante Recon NFT #60 on Opensea and watched it update my location on the map.
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The map is accurate and most NFT market places allow these to be viewed, with no warnings to the unsuspecting user. This is why projects like Honest Protocol are essential to the web3 ecosystem. Currently, users who wish to avoid surveillance schemes of this type will need to use VPNs.
Security Implications
The security implications arising from this type of NFT design can be widespread and very damaging. Worse case scenario, nation states or bad actors with enough funding can build fully fledged surveillance tools that can spy on NFT owners and enthusiasts.
I believe Vigilante Recon NFTs is the first step in the right direction to show the broader NFT community the type of malice that is capable and the need to protect users.