Marketplace suspends most NFT sales, citing 'rampant' fakes and plagiarism

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

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.

Did you Know?

Sunny Leone took the lead among Indian actors to secure her digital assets when she broke the news about her association with NFT, two months back. This made her the first Indian actress to mint NFTs

Reports of scams, counterfeits and «wash trading» have become commonplace. The US-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. While the Cent marketplace «beta.cent.co» has paused NFT sales, the part specifically for selling NFTs of tweets, which is called «Valuables», is still active. 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