The NFT market suspends most sales, citing “rampant” fakes and plagiarism

Sales of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have risen to nearly 25 billion dollars In 2021, causing many to be puzzled as to why so much money is being spent on physically non-existent items that anyone can watch online for free.

US-based Cent executed one of the first multi-million dollar NFT sales when it did Sell ​​the ex-CEO’s tweet on Twitter As an NFT in March. As of February 6, Cameron Hegazy, CEO and co-founder of Reuters, told Reuters it had stopped allowing buying and selling.

“There is a spectrum of activities that happen that basically shouldn’t happen — like, legally speaking,” Hegazy said.

While Cent marketplace “beta.cent.co” has temporarily halted sales of NFTs, the portion devoted to selling NFTs of tweets, called “Valuables”, remains active.

Hijazi highlighted three main problems: people selling unauthorized copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs for content that doesn’t belong to them, and people selling collections of security-like NFTs.

He said these issues are “rampant”, with users “mining, minting, and minting fake digital assets.”

“It just kept happening. We were banning the offending accounts, but it was like we were playing a whack-a-mole game…Every time we ban one, another account will show up, or three more.”

“money chase money”

While Cent, with 150,000 users and revenue “in the millions,” is a relatively small NFT platform, Hegazy said the problem of fake and illegal content exists across the industry.

“I think this is a fairly basic problem with Web3,” he said.

In a series of tweets, the company said that OpenSea had tried to limit the number of NFTs a user could issue for free, but retracted that decision after backlash from users, adding that it was “working through a number of solutions” to deter “bad actors”. With the support of the creators.

“It is against our policy to sell NFTs using plagiarized content,” an OpenSea spokesperson said.

“We’re working around the clock to ship products, add features, and improve our processes to meet the moment.”

But Hegazy said his company is keen to protect content creators, and may introduce centralized controls as a short-term measure in order to reopen the market, before exploring decentralized solutions.

After the sale of the Dorsey NFT Cent began to learn about what was going on in the NFT markets.

“We’ve come to realize that a lot of it is just money chasing after money.”