NFT projects lack acceptable smart contract testing, says ‘nameless’ founder

NFT projects lack acceptable smart contract testing, says ‘nameless’ founder

 

Jimmy McNelis, the founder of Web3 technology company ‘Nameless’, says there are too many Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFT) projects rushing to the market lacking proper smart contract testing — potentially leading to loss of millions.

 

McNelis said that a lot of NFT projects often rush to the market without fully simulating how its smart contracts will function, even skipping extensive audits in some of the cases.

 

McNelis mentioned that an example of this came to light during the sale of the Akutars NFT collection in February last year — featuring 15,000 coins that went up for sale on Winklevoss-owned NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway.

 

McNelis further said while the NFT drop sold out, a major bug saw USD 33 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) generated from the sale locked up in a smart contract that the developers have no access to, explaining:

 

“That was the sort of scenario that they could have tested more completely in a private test environment and run some tests against those sales and edge cases, that they may or may not have taken the time and energy to do or thought to do on a public testnet.”

 

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McNelis emphasized how crucial getting the test phase right is, given that smart contract bugs cannot be patched post-launch:

 

“The testing phase of a project is extremely crucial because it's going to really determine the success of your drop or launch as far as the technical and marketplace solution compatibility go.”

 

McNelis went on to explain that while projects can use public test nets to conduct trials for networks like ETH, many don’t as it could open the door for copycat scam projects. He also says that some don't want to test in public environments due to lack of confidentiality.

 

 

“The other thing is there's a plenty of brands that may be wanting to explore the Web3 market but aren't fully prepared to announce publicly that they're doing so.”

 

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‘Nameless’ was founded by McNelis in mid-2021, and the project has so far received backing from famous entrepreneur and NFT proponent Gary Vaynerchuck among others.

 

It is preparing for a new product launch later this month with an NFT software named StealthTest, which offers private testnets for developers to test trial smart contracts for Ethereum, IPFS, and Arweave.

 

Commenting on the NFT space, McNelis expects big-name firms to continue to pile into the market with their own tokenized products, and for organic retail interest to continue to grow.

 

He did note that when it comes to investments, it is still too early for the big financial companies to want to speculate on NFT themselves.

 

“I think institutions are still going to be mainly engrossed on producing things like that. But some of the courageous ones may speculate into some NFTs, but I don't think that NFTs are mature enough yet and the NFT markets are mature enough yet to make secure long-term investments,” he said.