Over 80% Of OpenSea's Free NFTs Are Fake, Spam Or Plagiarized

OpenSea, the world’s largest decentralized marketplace, has revealed that more than 80% of the “free” NFTs minted on the platform were plagiarized, fake or spam.

What Happened: In an announcement on Twitter on Jan. 28, OpenSea said it added a 50-item limit on its free minting tool after seeing an exponential increase in its misuse.

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

For context, in December 2021, the decentralized NFT minting and trading platform introduced a free NFT minting tool called “lazy minting” to eliminate the need for NFT creators to pay gas fees.

“It’s the first truly-free NFT maker, and today it works directly on Ethereum ETH/USD,” said OpenSea in a blog post.

After seeing numerous fake digital collectibles created, the decentralized marketplace imposed a 50-item limit on the amount of free NFTs that could be minted — a decision that led to numerous users being unable to complete their collections.

OpenSea has now reversed its decision to impose a limit after a significant amount of community backlash and said it was working toward more solutions to support its community while deterring bad actors.

Dogecoin DOGE/USD co-creator Billy Markus weighed in on OpenSea’s decision, calling the communication and level of thought that was put into the feature rollout unacceptable.

“When you do something like that on a whim, without announcing it beforehand, without expressing why or providing more information, it GREATLY affects creators,” said Markus on Twitter.

“You are a MULTI-BILLION company. The level of thought put into the rollout and communication is not acceptable.”

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash.