OpenSea confirmed an outage that affected its API. (Screenshot: OpenSea) OpenSea is limiting the use of its free non-fungible-token (NFT) minting tool, as it is being misused to commit fraud and create spam, the company said on Thursday. Touted as the largest NFT marketplace, you can find digital art, there are collectibles including game items, domain names, even digital representations of physical assets at OpenSea. Essentially, the platform is like an eBay for NFTs with millions of digital assets organized into hundreds of categories.
The “lazy minting” tool which according to OpenSea is being abused by bots and spammers was created in 2020 to make it easier for artists to get into the NFT space by charging no upfront gas fees. Gas fee is a one time fee charged for creating NFT on the blockchain network. The company said that it more than 80 per cent of NFTs created with its tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.
Earlier, people were free to mint as many NFTs as they liked on the platform using its own internal collection storefront contract, however, considering the recent fraudulent activities a 50-item limit on minting has been imposed.
“Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space,” OpenSea said on Twitter. It continued: “We didn’t make this decision lightly. We made the change to address feedback we were receiving from our entire community. However, we should have previewed this with you before rolling it out.”
According to PetaPixel, some creators have complained that OpenSea is slow to process takedown requests and offers poor support to victims of theft and fraud.
The NFT marketplace also surpassed the all-time high of $3.42 billion set in August 2021 to establish a new all-time high, surpassing the $3.5 billion mark in Ether trading volume, as per data from Dune Analaytics. OpenSea witnessed its trading volume hit an all-time high of $261 million. And in January alone, OpenSea set $169 million in trading volume for each day.
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