NFT firm which sold Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet suspends due to fraud issues

NFT trading platform Cent has suspended most sales due to fakes and plagiarism, according to its founder who said these are the fundamental problems in the market. The platform is renowned for the transaction of the founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey's first tweet for US$2.9 million. Cent was founded in 2017, and at that time, it was founded as an ad-free creator network, allowing users to offer each other crypto rewards for good posts and comments.

Cameron Hejazi, CEO, and co-founder of Cent published a post on Cent's website on 7 February, saying that, "Recently, on our network, we’ve seen people taking others’ work and re-minting it using our services. 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 behaviour – ethically, legally, and philosophically, it goes against our values and what we stand for as a company."

Hejazi added that although the company had banned offending accounts, the company believed that this approach was not sustainable. As a result, Cent stopped selling NFTs on its platforms. He added, "Our intent is to make this limitation temporary until we can rollout a strategy to overcome the challenges we’re facing. In the meantime, you can continue to freely mint and transfer posts."

Hejazi added, "Our mission at Cent is to enable anyone to make a creative income. We all know fair compensation is a massive problem in the creative industry. Much of the promise in "web3" is that we can fix the errors of the past, for instance with royalty standards ensuring creators get perpetually compensated for their work.

Counterfeits and plagiarism have been an issue in the world of NFTs. In a prior conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE,  To Cheung, founder of UD said that these issues are bound to crop up given that there are lacks in the governance and regulation of the NFT space, but of course, as the space matures, industry players do speculate more structure coming in place. However the lack of regulations can be a problem.

He also added that it is hard to tell whether an NFT product is genuine. "For instance, when a person offers an NFT product inspired by novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, he or she doesn't need to prove whether it is a genuine product or how it is created. To some extent, producing counterfeits is even easier," he said. Currently, as there is no regulation at the moment, when a buyer suspects whether the NFT product is genuine, he or she cannot lodge a complaint as nobody is governing.

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