OpenSea says its free NFT minting is mostly used to make fakes

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OpenSea, one of the most popular NFT marketplaces in the world, has a pretty serious problem with fakes. The platform has confirmed that more than 80 percent of the NFTs minted for free on the platform are fraudulent.

Users on OpenSea have the ability to mint NFTs on the platform for free. This means that they’ll get to skip paying the blockchain gas price. Instead, they can pass that fee off to any potential buyer in the future. And here’s where the story gets interesting.

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.

— OpenSea (@opensea) January 27, 2022

OpenSea recently put a 50-item limit on the amount of NFTs that a user could mint for free. As a result, many users were extremely upset. The platform eventually reversed the decision. But it did give us an explanation of why it added the limit in the first place.

“Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam,” reads a recent tweet thread from the company. “We didn’t make this decision lightly.”

READ MORE: OpenSea warns users of NFT phishing attempts after email leak

It’s pretty common knowledge in the NFT world that fakes and fraudulent scams are pretty prevalent. But OpenSea has a ridiculous number of fakes. It makes sense that the platform is desperately trying to slow down the rampant fraud that continues to happen on its site.

OpenSea said it’s “working through a number of solutions to ensure we support our creators while deterring bad actors.” Changes in the future will be previewed, the company confirmed, so it can hopefully avoid similar backlash going forward.

Money talks, and it looks like this move was costing too much. Going forward, it looks like OpenSea is going to listen to its users more as it continues to develop its NFT marketplace. It’s probably best to listen to the deep pockets that are making your platform relevant in the first place.

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