While NFT is gaining popularity among artists, the NFT online marketplace OpenSea had received tremendous criticism and complaints from the crypto community following the recent major exploits on its platform. The exploit had enabled attackers to purchase NFTs at below market value and later resell them for large profits.
Apart from that, the platform had caused another stir among its community after it suddenly placed a restriction on its free minting tool. Though the decision was backtracked shortly after receiving tremendous backlash from the community.
The “lazy minting” tool was originally created in 2020 to make it easier for artists of modest means to get into the NFT space by charging no upfront gas fees. However, OpenSea had recently discovered the misuse of the feature, which led to plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam flooding its platform.
To all the creators in our community impacted by the 50 item limit we added to our free minting tool, we hear you and we're sorry.
— OpenSea (@opensea) January 27, 2022
We have reversed the decision.
But we also want to offer an explanation ↯ pic.twitter.com/Y3igaE1RM2
In response, OpenSea said that it was limiting the amount of NFTs users could make, allowing users to only create up to five collections and 50 items per collection.
The decision was met by backlash from its community, with users complaining that they were unable to complete their collections or upload new work, leading OpenSea to scrap the limit and apologize to its users all in the same day.
However, we've recently seen misuse of this feature increase exponentially.
— OpenSea (@opensea) January 27, 2022
Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.
According to a follow-up thread posted on Twitter, the platform revealed that it has seen an exponential increase of misuse of its free minting tool, where 80% of NFTs that were created with it have been confirmed to be fake, plagiarised, and spam.
“Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space,”
“In addition to reversing the decision, we’re working through a number of solutions to ensure we support our creators while deterring bad actors.” OpenSea tweeted.
In addition, the platform promises to first preview any significant changes with its community before rolling them out. However, OpenSea did not reveal its plans with the large number of bogus NFTs that have been discovered in its marketplace at this time.
With OpenSea acknowledging the issues of plagiarism and scams on its platform, we can expect some new policies to be introduced to address the issue.
