OpenSea, the largest non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace built on Ethereum blockchain, has revealed in a series of tweets about a week ago that over 80% of its free NFT mints were plagiarized, spam or fake.
In December 2020, OpenSea launched the free NFT minting feature known as “lazy minting”, which gives artists the ability to release NFTs without paying upfront gas costs.
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OpenSea Introduces and Reverses New Rules
In order to combat the misuse of the free minting feature, a new rule was introduced on 27th January. The NFT marketplace introduced the new rule that limited free minting only to five collections of up to 50 NFTs each, but the community responded with backlashes, which later led to the reversal of the decision.
In order to clear the air over the issue and to clarify the reason for introducing the rule, OpenSea wrote:
“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. We have reversed the decision. But we also want to offer an explanation
“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.
“However, we’ve recently seen misuse of this feature increase exponentially. Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.
“We didn’t make this decision lightly. We made the change to address feedback we were receiving from our entire community. However, we should have previewed this with you before rolling it out.
“In addition to reversing the decision, we’re working through a number of solutions to ensure we support our creators while deterring bad actors.”
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It’s widely known that OpenSea is still recovering following an exploit tagged as a user interface issue, which caused some NFTs to be listed thousands of dollars below market price.
Some users lost their highly valued NFTs to this exploit, but OpenSea has devised a means to reimburse the victims of the unfortunate incident.
