“There is a spectrum of activity going on that really shouldn’t be happening – legally, right.” With these words in a tweet, which filter a certain surprise, the CEO of the Nft marketplace Cameron Hejazi announces the stop to almost all sales on his platform. Cent is the marketplace where Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, signed by the former Twitter CEO, was sold. Nft similar to this one, called ‘Valuables’, are the only ones still on sale because they are signed directly by the authors themselves.
The message summarizes a press release, published by the company, which mentions “people who have taken the work of others” and re-created it using their services. “We believe”, the statement continues, “that these people are malicious actors, who use Cent with the aim of confusing users in order to sell counterfeit work. We do not condone this behavior – ethically, legally and philosophically: it goes against the ideals we have as a company ”.
The phenomenon of counterfeit NFTs is by no means new: since OpenSea first released a feature to allow users to create their own NFTs using a dedicated platform smart contract at no cost, the number of counterfeit NFTs has increased. Allowing users to be able to create NFTs directly on a sales platform is a good way to simplify creation: usually, development experience in Solidity, the programming language built on Ethereum, is required to build an NFT collection. Removing the programming barrier allows anyone who knows how to upload a photo to the internet to create collections.
Tutorial
How to create an NFT and how to sell it online
by Emanuele Capone
The Cent marketplace has also released a similar feature, free of charge. The expected behavior was once again the proliferation of new original works by artists unfamiliar with software development, but the result was a cascade of collections copied from the best known. Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks are just two of the most famous collections, and also among the most copied: a user who lacks domain knowledge of the blockchain world usually does not generally have analytical skills to distinguish a true from a fake, although there are many indicators. This, combined with the fact that everything is public on the blockchain and that anyone can see that a collection is selling well, leads so-called ‘malevolent actors’ to see incentives to create counterfeit collections.
Cent’s announcement is not a solution to the problem: as written in the press release, it is a way to stop and reflect on how to control the phenomenon, and to send a message to the entire web3 community suggesting that they do the same. Some solutions already exist, but there are still many questions to be answered.
Collection verified on OpenSea (Photo: opensea.io)
One way in which it is possible to distinguish real collections from fake ones is to associate a blue sticker with the real ones, similar to the one you see next to famous names on social networks, which is very familiar and which is applied exclusively by the staff of the platform on which the breakfast is sold. This solution is adopted by OpenSea and Nftrade.
Another solution could involve the simplified NFT creation service: after all, collections are created to have intrinsic value. Whether it’s access to an exclusive club, a constant stream of tokens or access to the metaverse, an NFT is not just an image, but a badge with unique characteristics. The goal of sales platforms is to make everyone understand: but it will take time.