The NFT cryptoart market has been populated with a large library of scams over the past year. From NFT fighting games to Minecraft Blockverse swindled, there have been too many to count. Scams have become so frequent that NFT marketplace Opensea has spoken out on the subject, and they're also worried.
Opensea reveals percentage of NFT scams
As the largest NFT marketplace, most cryptoart minting — the act of putting an item on the blockchain — goes through the service. However, in a recent development, the platform added a “50 item limit” to its free minting tool.
This change saw massive backlash for the platform. As a result, the NFT marketplace has already reversed the minting limit on its tools, but not before explaining why the limit was introduced in the first place.
Users were told that the limit was introduced to fight against the overwhelming amount of fraud and spam that exists on the platform. Scams, plagiarism, fake collections and more were found to be the majority of content on the service.
“Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam,” Opensea said. It was also revealed that the service had seen “misuse of this feature increase exponentially.”
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The community isn't happy
Even after the minting limit was reverted back to its original, unlimited state, the NFT community is still upset at Opensea. Amongst the spam of NFT accounts promoting cryptoart lines and other crypto-related products, fans continued to criticise the platform.
Others offered “solutions” for the market to improve the safety of cryptoart. Multiple users told the platform that it should have a verification system to approve who can buy and sell NFTs, essentially turning the service into a bank.
Of course, that idea goes against the whole point of cryptoart. NFTs and cryptocurrency are designed to be part of decentralised service, one that forgoes verification and IDs. If verification was needed to be on the blockchain, then it would go against the whole point of the platform.
As it stands, plagiarism, spam and scams will remain a major part of the NFT market. For every Beeple, there's four people selling licensed video game soundtracks or stolen artwork. It's just how it is.