Cent, the corporate that final yr helped Jack Dorsey public sale an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, is briefly halting most transactions to handle “rampant” gross sales of faux and plagiarized tokens. In an interview printed on Friday, Cameron Hejazi, the CEO and co-founder of the corporate, instructed Reuters Cent stopped permitting customers to purchase and promote most NFTs on February sixth. It continues to function its Valuables market, the place the place folks should purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, however that’s about it.
“There’s a spectrum of exercise that’s occurring that mainly should not be occurring – like, legally” Hejazi instructed Reuters. He stated Cent has tried to ban unhealthy actors however in contrast the trouble to a recreation of whack-a-mole. “Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up,” Hejazi stated.
Last month, OpenSea, one of many largest NFT marketplaces on the web, stated greater than 80 p.c of the tokens lately created by way of its free minting instrument concerned plagiarized work, faux collections and spam. The admission got here after the corporate had tried to restrict the variety of NFTs customers may mint without spending a dime. After reversing the choice, the corporate stated it was engaged on a number of options to discourage unhealthy actors. Before January’s announcement, artists and photographers had complained for months that the corporate hadn’t accomplished sufficient to handle the difficulty of plagiarism.
“I feel it is a fairly basic downside with Web3,” Hejazi instructed Reuters. In the instant future, he stated Cent might introduce centralized controls to facilitate a reopening of its market. The firm may then later discover extra decentralized options to the issue.
