# Understanding Security Issues in the NFT Ecosystem

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08893 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08893/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [How Agentic Is Agentic Commerce? A Population-Scale Measurement of x402 Adoption and Authenticity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12575/) (2026)
- [Exploring Gender and Race Biases in the NFT Market](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06484/) (2023)
- [The Art NFTs and Their Marketplaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14942/) (2022)
- [Abnormal Trading Detection in the NFT Market](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04643/) (2023)
- [Clustering and analysis of user behaviour in blockchain: A case study of Planet IX](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11702/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a way to collect digital art as well as an investment vehicle. Despite having been popularized only recently, NFT markets have witnessed several high-profile (and high-value) asset sales and a tremendous growth in trading volumes over the last year. Unfortunately, these marketplaces have not yet received much security scrutiny. Instead, most academic research has focused on attacks against decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and automated techniques to detect smart contract vulnerabilities. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the market dynamics and security issues of the multi-billion dollar NFT ecosystem. In this paper, we first present a systematic overview of how the NFT ecosystem works, and we identify three major actors: marketplaces, external entities, and users. We perform an in-depth analysis of the top 8 marketplaces (ranked by transaction volume) to discover potential issues associated with such marketplaces. Many of these issues can lead to substantial financial losses. We also collected a large amount of asset and event data pertaining to the NFTs being traded in the examined marketplaces. We automatically analyze this data to understand how the entities external to the blockchain are able to interfere with NFT markets, leading to serious consequences, and quantify the malicious trading behaviors carried out by users under the cloak of anonymity.