Marketplace suspends most NFT sales, citing 'rampant' fakes and plagiarism

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Top Highlights

• Hejazi highlighted three main problems: people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.

• he biggest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, valued at $13.3 billion after its latest round of venture funding, said last month more than 80% of the NFTs minted for free on its platform were "plagiarized works, fake collections and spam".

• LONDON, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The platform which sold an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.9 million has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a "fundamental problem" in the fast-growing digital assets market.

• Reports of scams, counterfeits and "wash trading" have become commonplace.

• He said these issues were "rampant", with users "minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets".

• While Cent, with 150,000 users and revenue "in the millions", is a relatively small NFT platform, Hejazi said the issue of fake and illegal content exists across the industry.

• But Hejazi said his company was keen on protecting content-creators, and may introduce centralised controls as a short-term measure in order to re-open the marketplace, before exploring decentralised solutions.

Toughts & Comments

Ron Sheridan

The economic impact (dollar value) of Crypto fraud is already more than 2/3rds of the impact of Credit Card fraud. NFTs are the new wrinkle in that fabric. IMO Things will get a lot worse in the NFT space before they get better.