Well, I stole some NFTs

Posted on December 31, 2021  •  2 minutes  • 372 words

I was getting bored sitting around, at this time of year. Today, the year will end and within a few hours, and it’ll be gone. I sat down at the chair and was watching this John Hammond video . Then it came to my mind to download some NFTs and see how it goes.

Let The Hacking Begin

I used basic bash script to download NFTs from Wall St. Bulls and Cryptopunks. They had their own website where they showcased their collection in plain JPEG images, that were accesible using simple identifiers. I went to one of their NFTs and right clicked the image, found the image url and wrote the script. It was going well, I downloaded over 70-80 images per minutes running the script.

Well, enough downloads from Wall Street Bulls. Now over to Cryptopunks.

When I thought I had exploited enough, I Ctrl+C’d the script and head on to work on Mutant Ape Yacht Club. These NFTs were all over the internet, specially Twitter. I would see every (wannabe?) web3 enthusiast on twitter with these images as their DP.

Now, while I was surfing over opensea.io , I found out that they hosted the images on.. probably Google Cloud. It was hard to iterate over them with an identifier. I had to switch to python for scraping. Using BeautifulSoup didn’t help, as they used Cloudflare to protect themselves against bots.

That’s When You Pull Out The Big Gun

Finding no other way, I headed over to my terminal and installed selenium, went to web, downloaded and installed chromedriver too. Now, it tooks few lines to automate the task. And bam, the NFTs from Opensea started downloading.

There’s always a way, huh?

Now that I had all the fun, I went over to my folder and saw that I had downloaded 250+MB around of images. Pretty good for a beginning.

Conclusion

Well, I know these are no way to own/steal NFTs, I just did it for the fun. Scripting the Mutant Ape Yacht Club was a learning for sure. This is it, feel free to mix and master these scripts to download favorite NFTs. If you’d like to access those scripts, here’s the Github repository

Till then, Happy New Year!