Popular NFT marketplace, Cent, which is one of the first marketplaces to allow people to sell tweets as NFTs, has suspended almost all of its activity citing counterfeiting problems. Cent is also known as the marketplace where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his very first tweet in the form of an NFT.
As first reported by Reuters, the NFT marketplace Cent has had to shut down almost all sales because, as Cent's CEO Cameron Hejazi admitted, “there’s a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn’t be happening — like, legally.”
There are three major problems that Cameron highlighted - 1) people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs, 2) People making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, 3) people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.
Although, the part of Cent marketplace focused on selling NFTs of tweets, which is called "Valuables" is still active, the marketplace of Cent -- "beta.cent.co" -- has paused NFT sales.
Further, in a community update, Cent CEO Cameron said - "Recently, on our network, we’ve seen people taking others’ work and re-minting it using our services. We believe these people are bad actors, who only engage with Cent for the purpose of tricking others into purchasing counterfeit work. We do not condone this behavior – ethically, legally, and philosophically, it goes against our values and what we stand for as a company."
The suspension of selling NFTs is a temporary step till the marketplace figure out a sustainable solution to counterfeiting and rollout a strategy to overcome the challenges. In the community update, Cameron also discussed strategies that other NFT selling services - OpenSea and Nifty Gateway, as how these NFT marketplace restrict bad users from minting fake NFTs.
Notably, Cent launched "NFT minting" last year as an experiment of its goal of creative income.
Cent provided this functionality at no cost to its community, reducing the hurdles to minting and hopefully inviting more people into its ecosystem.
NFT minting is the process of converting a digital file to a crypto collectible. It is impossible to delete, edit or modify the digital item or file stored on a blockchain. The process of uploading an item to the blockchain, similar to the creation of fiat coins, is called “minting.”