Security problems and endless copies of lots (for which no one is responsible) are ubiquitous, and OpenSea’s attempts to stop this are futile and only irritate users. How does a marketplace that is valued at $13.3 billion work?

Users have already dubbed the platform not “Open Sea,” but “Ocean of Piracy.” Indeed, who would have thought that someone would copy “pictures”?

Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.

Source: Official OpenSea Twitter account

In August 2021, the monthly transaction volume on OpenSea reached $3.4 billion. On Jan. 6, 2022, after a $300 million investment round, the marketplace was valued at $13.3 billion.

Monkeys, monkeys and monkeys again

Bored Ape Yacht Club

We’ve mentioned Bored Ape Yacht Club more than once. The popularity of cartoon monkeys has skyrocketed. Right now, the cheapest NFT is about $309,000, and OpenSea is crawling with knockoffs. But, have you heard of Phunky Apes Yacht Club?

Phunky Apes Yacht Club

Yep, it’s just a mirror token of the Bored Apes Yacht Club. OpenSea soon had the collection banned. Now the project sells mirror monkeys, dodging bans, on other marketplaces, becoming an example of how the NFT world deals with plagiarism.

OpenSea is very slow to respond to complaints about account blocking and gives insufficient support to victims of plagiarism.

Recall, at the end of 2020, OpenSea allowed absolutely all users to mint tokens for free. That didn’t seem to be enough for the company, and it canceled the verification of NFT collections before publication. Can you guess what it led to? Nifty Gateway and Superrare, direct competitors of OpenSea, still moderate the content that ends up on their sites.

More vulnerabilities

After a while, scammers found vulnerabilities in the system and began buying up tokens en masse at below-market prices. OpenSea reimbursed the owners for their losses and paid more than $6.2 million. That’s the price of popularity.

Initially, the fraudsters profited from the works of artists from DeviantArt, later they started stealing pictures from Twitter, Steam, and any other possible options.

Algorithms to recognize plagiarism, just do not work. You have to wait a week for a response from the technical support of the resource. And even these thieves were able to take advantage of it. They flooded the main OpenSea server in Discord and offered users to switch to a separate server, the “OpenSea Support Service”.

After joining the server, hackers ask to turn on the screen demo feature. Next, the victim is told that the MetaMask extension for Chrome needs to be re-synced through the mobile app. The mobile wallet is synchronized with the wallet in Chrome through the settings of the plugin, which displays a QR code on the screen after entering the password. The QR code appears, followed immediately by the message “Synchronized” (because thieves got hold of your wallet).

Another story. One of the Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens – using a vulnerability bought for $1,760 and lightning-fast resold for $192,000. Hackers are massively taking advantage of obsolete smart contracts that are on the blockchain but no longer available on the platform. The losses of NFT collection owners exceed $1 million.

What did OpenSea say about this? “We are aware of the problem and are addressing it.”

The NFT frenzy

As you may have noticed, you hear about NFT from every iron. Good old-fashioned business coaches, traders, and other “millionaires” are flooding social media with advertisements.

NFT is like bitcoin in 2014. And anyone who invests a couple of dollars in NFT now will be a millionaire in a couple of years. See for yourself: an NFT drawing of a rock was bought for $100, and a week later it was sold for $1.3 million.
Don’t buy Bitcoin now, you won’t make as much money on it as you did a couple of years ago. BUT. NFT now is like bitcoin in 2014. And whoever invests a couple of dollars in NFT now will be a millionaire in a couple of years.

But there are also funny stories. For example, an artist from the United States sold an animated trash can for $250,000. The tank became a meme and inspired copycat versions, increasing interest in the original.

The price of this GIF is $250,000

How about $1 million selfies? A guy from Indonesia, selling his photos as NFT and managing to generate enough hype to sell out 933 of his photos.

Originally Ghozali, that’s the guy’s name, took selfies as a project for a video he intended to make for his graduation.

You can do anything like flipping or whatever but please don’t abuse my photos or my parents will very disappointed to me.

Source: Ghozali Twitter account

Blockchain games

Just recently, we wrote about NFT 2022 — trends of blockchain games and metaverse. And it wasn’t off to a very good start.

Minecraft was about to launch a Blockverse server where users could create NFTs and then sell them. To get on the server, users had to buy NFTs from the developers, a sale that started on January 24, 2022. When 10,000 non-exchangeable tokens were sold within minutes of the launch, the creators of the project stopped logging on and disappeared, earning about $1.2 million this way.

Even NFT supporters are not thrilled with this development.

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