Cent, one of the first marketplaces to allow people to sell tweets as NFTs, has suspended almost all of its activity due to plagiarism-related problems. According to its CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi, people keep selling NFTs of other NFTs or using content that is not owned by them originally to mint these tokens. The sale of tweet NFTs is still active.
Cent Struggles With Unauthorized Use and Plagiarism
Cent, one of the first marketplaces to allow users to tokenize tweets and sell them, has announced it is suspending almost all of its activities due to plagiarism issues. The company, famous for hosting the sale of the first tweet of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey for $2.9 million, recognizes the NFT industry faces problems.
Cameron Hejazi, founder and CEO of Cent, told Reuters that the activities on its marketplace have been suspended since February 6. However, the part of the platform dedicated to trading NFTs of tweets is still active. On the reasons for this suspension, Hejazi stated:
There’s a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn’t be happening – like, legally.
He further explained that the company was forced to take a platform-wide approach because each time it banned an account involved in these activities, two or three more would pop up. Hejazi compared this to playing a “whack a mole” game.
An Industry-Wide Problem
However, this problem is not exclusive to Cent, which only has 150K users. Hejazi stated that this is an industry-wide problem and statements from Opensea, one of the biggest NFT markets by sales volume, seem to confirm this.
Last month, Opensea, a marketplace with more than $20 billion in NFT sales volume reported, stated it was adding a 50 NFT limit on its free NFT minting tool. While they reversed this decision, Opensea stated that they have seen misuse of this tool, explaining that:
Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.
The boom of this market, which has raised the prices on some collections, has also given rise to this forgery market seeking to take easy profits. Opensea and other platforms are creating tools to detect if the associated content of an NFT is really legit. Hejazi also stated that his company might seek to implement centralized solutions to open the marketplace as a short-term measure.
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