The Solana-based wallet provider Phantom is taking matters into its own hands by launching a new burn feature that will allow users to remove spam NFTs sent by scammers.
Phantom recently announced through a blog post that the new burn feature would be accessible on the Phantom Wallet App under the Burn Token tab, which will allow users to receive a minuscule deposit in the form of a $SOL token each time they use it.
“We’re still in the Wild West days of Web3. As the crypto ecosystem grows, so have the number of bad actors looking for ways to steal user’s funds. The rapid growth in popularity of NFTs has led to an increasingly prevalent method of attack for scammers – Spam NFTs.”
Why is Phantom Taking this Decision?
Phantom mentioned that spam NFTs have increased on Solana because of its low transaction fees. According to the reports, bad actors often airdrop supposedly free NFTs to the masses containing malicious links. These links are presented as one of the steps to mint the NFT and, upon completion, can drain the entire wallet of the user.
“These scams are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. For instance, after a contract address and domain are identified as malicious, scammers can change the metadata of an NFT to try to avoid being blocklisted. It can feel like an endless game of whack-a-mole,” the blog post read.
Moreover, this step is a part of Phantom’s initiative to counter spam NFTs and malicious actors in the industry. The team at Phantom is fighting scammers through the phishing warning system that warns users about any malicious transactions that can compromise their assets.
Phantom has also partnered with Blowfish to improve the alerting system. “While we’re introducing NFT Burning today, we’re not stopping there. Users can look forward to more automated spam detection in the future. Using providers like SimpleHash and our own internal reporting, we will be able to gauge if an NFT is likely to be spam,” the post read.
This is an excellent initiative by Phantom as it will help make the NFT industry safer for the collectors and creators.
