NFT Marketplace Shuts Down Most Sales Due To Too Much Fraud & Plagiarism

Non-fungible tokens were created to ensure that the proper ownership rights could be assigned to digital assets. However, this is not to say that the system is entirely flaw-free. After all, despite gaining exponential popularity, the concept is still fairly new. 

NFT marketplace Cent has unfortunately run into this issue headfirst. Almost all its sales have had to be shut down, because of countless instances of fraud. 

CEO Cameron Hejazi posted a community update earlier this month, writing that “bad actors” had been minting NFTs on the marketplace despite not being the proper owners. This meant they were also selling and making profits off things that didn’t belong to them, or tokenizing things they didn’t own. 

“We do not condone this behavior—ethically, legally, and philosophically, it goes against our values and what we stand for as a company,” Hejazi stresses. Although the “offending accounts” have been banned, the firm realizes that it isn’t a sustainable solution. So, the ability to sell NFTs on Cent has been removed. 

“Our intent is to make this limitation temporary until we can rollout a strategy to overcome the challenges we’re facing,” the blog post states. 

There’s an exception, though: ‘Valuables’. These are tokens of tweets that have been “autographed” by their posters. Cent may be, after all, best known for the marketplace that Jack Dorsey’s first tweet was sold as an NFT on. 

Counterfeiting is “a pretty fundamental problem with Web3,” Hejazi tells Reuters. “There’s a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn’t be happening—like, legally.”

Because of the novelty of NFTs, “there is no industry wide standard for counteracting bad behavior,” he points out. Until something like this can be enforced, regulating the proper ownership of digital assets may remain a tricky endeavor. 

[via Reuters and Futurism, image ID 212771355 © Rokas Tenys | Dreamstime.com]