Magic Eden is looking into strange activity that saw thousands of NFTs change hands for 0 ETH. The moves sparked fear of a major hack, but the real story turned out to be more surprising than expected.

Trader Cirrus first spotted the issue on September 25. They noticed one wallet pulling thousands of NFTs from hundreds of different accounts. Each move showed up as a sale on Magic Eden, yet every single one was priced at zero. Cirrus told users to revoke their NFT approvals right away, just to be safe.

At first, people worried that a hacker had found a way into an old marketplace contract. That would let someone drain NFTs without an owner's direct say-so. It's the kind of news that spreads fast in crypto circles.

But researcher 0xQuit soon offered a different explanation. According to this account, the transfers were actually a white-hat rescue. A friendly party moved 3,832 NFTs into a safe wallet before a bad actor could grab them first. Those NFTs were worth more than USD 5.7 million combined.

The NFTs came from wallets that still had old, unsafe approvals tied to Magic Eden's former EVM marketplace. Magic Eden had already dropped the payment system behind the issue back in October 2024 and closed its EVM marketplace earlier this year. Still, some users never removed their old permissions, leaving the accounts exposed.

The root cause traces back to a flaw in Limit Break's Payment Processor V2. The risk mainly affects NFTs that were listed between February and October 2024.

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