"Big Bang Theory" and sensual images on Magic Eden

Key points: 

• Some users of Magic Eden, Solana’s largest NFT marketplace, have seen some strange images on the platform instead of the NFT they were trying to view — including pornographic images and stills from the Big Bang Theory TV series.
• The marketplace is blaming the hacked image caching service for the brief confusion. 
• "Your NFTs are safe and Magic Eden has not been hacked," the marketplace tweeted.
• The company doesn't believe it was specifically targeted by third-party hackers, and a representative of Magic Eden added that he believed other sites were also affected. 

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Over the past day, some users of Magic Eden, Solana’s largest marketplace, have seen some strange images on the platform instead of the NFT they were trying to view — including pornographic images and stills from the Big Bang Theory TV series.

Now, the marketplace is blaming the hacked image caching service for the brief confusion. Magic Eden, which also supports NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon, tweeted late Tuesday afternoon that a "third-party service" for image caching had been compromised. Users began discussing the issue on Twitter late Monday.

"Your NFTs are safe and Magic Eden has not been hacked," the marketplace tweeted. "Unfortunately, you may have seen some um, unpleasant images. Make sure to hard refresh your browser to resolve the issue."

It comes after many users on Twitter said they had accidentally seen nude photos and images from the series, which began airing on Monday. 

"What the hell is going on, why is my 5-year-old watching porn jpegs on the [Magic Eden] website," tweeted SolProfessor565 on Tuesday.

The startup, valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022, first became aware of the situation in the early afternoon and implemented a fix within an hour, a Magic Eden representative told shortly after the tweet. However, some users still saw unexpected images and had to refresh their web browsers, hence the statement.

The company doesn't believe it was specifically targeted by third-party hackers, and a representative of Magic Eden added that he believed other sites were also affected. For security reasons, the NFT startup declined to name its image caching partners.

NFTs are blockchain tokens that represent ownership of unique items, including digital goods such as artwork, collectibles, and video game items. Magic Eden is the dominant player in Solana's NFT market and is gradually expanding to other platforms.

There have been examples in the past of the actual NFT graph being hosted on a centralized web server, which can cause problems if the server goes offline. In this case, however, the Magic Eden website itself appears to have been affected by the issue due to an attack on an external service provider, while the actual NFT itself ended up being unaffected.