OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplace has reported in a Twitter post that more than 80% of the NFTs created for free on its platform were plagiarized from other artists, fake, or spam. The company reported that users are misusing the free minting tools on the platform to commit fraud and create spam.
OpenSea revealed this rampant fraud shortly after the announcement that users would now be able to make a maximum of five collections with 50 NFTs for each collection using the free feature.
The company created the free minting feature in 2020 as a way to encourage and make it possible for artists of modest means to enter the NFT market by charging no upfront gas fees. However, the platform has seen an exponential uptick in the number of people misusing the platform to create plagiarized, fake, or spam NFTs.
In response to the increased misuse of the minting feature, OpenSea announced that it would limit the number of NFTs a user could make, attracting backlash from the OpenSea community. Users of the platform complained of the inability to complete their collections or upload new work. Following these complaints, OpenSea scrapped the limit.
“Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space,” OpenSea said on Twitter. “We didn’t make this decision lightly. We made the change to address feedback we were receiving from our entire community. However, we should have previewed this with you before rolling out.” OpenSea continued in response to the backlash from limiting the number of NFTs users could create.
The challenge of plagiarism, fakes, and spam is a growing problem in the NFT space with scammers and bots targeting creators and stealing their artwork. Original creators who have been victims of these bots and scammers have bewailed the poor support from OpenSea in processing takedown requests.
OpenSea also announced on Twitter that it was working on solutions to support legitimate NFT creators and deter frauds and scammers.