After numerous complaints from artists and creators, the NFT giant OpenSea finally came up with a solution.
On Wednesday, OpenSea announced the integration of new features in its considerable efforts to boost authenticity of NFT collectibles on the platform.
As part of the strategy, the NFT leading marketplace will focus on two areas.
OpenSea to Protect NFT Community
OpenSea is looking for ways to shore up security on its platform.
First, OpenSea is adding more layers of verification and a verified badge for an account. Second, it is implementing an automated system that assists detecting and banking copymints.
Similar to social networks, the verification badge serves as the blue check mark of Facebook and Twitter provided for fanpages or personal accounts to show authenticity.
Account verification and collection badging was OpenSea’s initial plan. But it then switched to a different approach after collecting the community’s point of view, that the process is slow and cumbersome.
A Step Toward Greater Security
OpenSea made little changes to simplify the process. Users holding over 100 ETH of collection volume are invited to join a system specializing in verification.
This also means that users have options and certainly account verified will always be better.
Once accepting the invitation, eligible creators can register for badging for a collection with significant interest or sales.
The system will guide them through each step of account verification and collection badging. After completing these steps, users will wait for approval.
For copymint reduction, OpenSea has rolled out a two-part system. This system will cover two areas: Image Recognition Technology (IRT) and Dedicated Human Review.
These two aspects will work together for good results.
Simply put, the IRT scans all NFTs on OpenSea and matches them with a list of the most copy-minted collections following key criterias like “flips, rotations & other permutations.”
The mechanism will be constantly trained and upgraded.
As for Dedicated Human Review, think of humans who check, audit the process implementation of the system in accordance with the set of criteria.
The “humans in loop” will also propose the adjustments, removal suggestions, and train the model.
OpenSea commented in a blog post:
“With this system, our long-term goal is two-pronged: first, with help from our community, to eliminate all existing copymints on OpenSea; and second, to help prevent new copymints from appearing in the first place. We’ve already started the process of delisting identified copymint collections, and we’ll scale up our removal process in phases over the next several weeks.”
OpenSea’s competitive friend, Rarible, has already applied a human-moderated verification system. The platform said that it has reduced the problem of plagiarism by 90% since the beginning of 2021.
NFT Copyright Is Still A Major Concern
Artnapping is so popular in the traditional art industry. When art corporates with NFTs, NFTs corporate with art theft.
The easy creation and sale of NFTs gradually become target for the bad guys.
Piracy on online NFT selling platforms tends to get worse and worse, as artists helplessly watch their artworks being robbed and sold as NFTs.
If we give an in-depth look at OpenSea’s new features, they only address some of the issues. The marketplace’s efforts are still within its own network.
It does not mean OpenSea hasn’t made its best efforts. According to OpenSea, the platform eliminates around 3500 NFT collections every week owing to counterfeiting or other concerns.
In addition to false NFTs and plagiarism, OpenSea must cope with a technological weakness that allows unscrupulous actors to manufacture NFTs using someone else’s digital identity or purchase NFT from an owner who does not wish to sell it.
The point is that it’s complex.
In fact, there are a couple of specialized software to detect plagiarized NFT works. However, the difficulty here is that the complaint and handling stage is not easy.
Creators will need to prove their ownerships of each NFT work. Imagine your artwork is split into hundreds NFTs, what a pain!