NFT Marketplace Halts Most Transactions, Citing 'Rampant' Fakes and Plagiarism

Reuters reports that a popular NFT trading platform "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...."The U.S.-based Cent executed one of the first known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold the former Twitter CEO's [first] tweet as an NFT last March. But as of February 6, it has stopped allowing buying and selling, CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters.... 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 said these issues were "rampant", with users "minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets". "It kept happening. We would ban offending accounts but it was like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole... Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up...." 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. Engadget reports that Cent "continues to operate its Valuables marketplace, the place where people can purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, but that's about it." See also: More Than 80% of NFTs Created For Free On OpenSea Are Fraud Or Spam, Company Says.

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