Marketplace suspends most NFT sales, citing ''rampant'' fakes and plagiarism
Categories: DAILY NEWS
The platform which sold an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.9 million 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.Sales of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, soared to around $25 billion in 2021, leaving many baffled as to why so much money is being spent on items that do not physically exist and which anyone can view online for free. NFTs are crypto assets that record the ownership of a digital file such as an image, video or text. Anyone can create, or "mint", an NFT, and ownership of the token does not usually confer ownership of the underlying item.The U.S.-based Cent executed one of the first known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold the former Twitter CEO`s tweet as an NFT last March. But as of Feb. 6, it has stopped allowing buying and selling, CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters. "There's A spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn`t be happening - like, legally" Hejazi said.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." "MONEY CHASING MONEY" Such problems may come into greater focus as major brands join the rush towards the so-called "metaverse", or Web3. Coca-Cola and luxury brand Gucci are among companies to have sold NFTs, while YouTube said it will explore NFT features.To many NFT-enthusiasts, the decentralised nature of blockchain technology is appealing, allowing users to create and trade digital assets without a central authority controlling the activity. But 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.It was after the Dorsey NFT sale that Cent started to get a sense of what was going on in NFT markets."We realized that a lot of it is just money chasing money."