NFT Marketplace that auctioned off first tweet suspends sales due to plagiarism

Plagiarism, fakes, scams, and fraud can be found all throughout the NFT space right now.

The problem has become so bad that one NFT marketplace, Cent, is taking a drastic step: The platform is suspending sales of NFTs.

In an announcement posted to its website last week, Cent announced that it was removing the ability to sell NFTs on its platform. The company says this is a temporary move until it can figure out how to deal with bad actors abusing the platform by minting and selling NFTs that don’t belong to them.

“Recently, on our network, we’ve seen people taking others’ work and re-minting it using our services,” reads the announcement. “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.”

While Cent is not as big in the NFT space as popular marketplaces such as OpenSea, readers may still have heard of the platform.

Cent made headlines in 2021 when Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey auctioned off the very first tweet he posted on the platform. The NFT of the tweet, which was posted in 2006 by Dorsey, ended up fetching $2.9 million.

If you’re still looking to bid on NFTs of tweets, you actually still can do that on Cent. Its tweet marketplace will still be available. Cent says it’s experimenting with a number of ways for creators to monetize their content and its NFTs marketplace was just one of them.

Speaking of the biggest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, the platform recently shared that more than 80 percent of the NFTs minted on its platform were “plagiarized works, fake collections and spam.” Cent even mentioned OpenSea in its announcement, referring to how the platform deals with bad actors as “whack-a-mole.”

Plagiarism, fraud and scams are clearly a problem found in the entire NFT space. And, regardless of what measures are enacted, it will likely always be a problem to some degree. That’s a major issue with decentralization as a whole.