Tweet NFT Marketplace ‘Cent’ Halts Sales Citing ‘Rampant Plagiarism’

NFT marketplace “Cent” has had to temporarily halt most transactions on its platform to address “rampant” sales of fake and plagiarised NFTs.

While the marketplace has had to pause NFT sales, one part of the platform that sells NFTs of tweets, called “Valuables”, remains active.

People Selling Content They Didn’t Own

Cent, most famous for helping Jack Dorsey auction an NFT of his first tweet for US$2.9 million last year, has paused most transactions because it claims people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them. Cameron Hejazi, CEO and founder of the company, said Cent called the halt on February 6.

Sales of NFTs generated US$25 billion in 2021, so it is expected that reports of scams, counterfeits and “wash trading” have become commonplace. Some Twitter users grabbed the opportunity to mock the situation:

According to Hejazi, “There’s a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn’t be happening – like, legally.” The CEO also highlighted three main problems active in the marketplace:

• people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs;
• people making NFTs of content that does not belong to them; and
• people selling sets of NFTs that resemble a security.

Hejazi added that these issues were “rampant”, with users “minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets”.

It kept happening. We would ban offending accounts but it was like we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole … Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up.

Cameron Hejazi, CEO and co-founder, Cent

Issues Come with the Territory

Just as NFTs have exploded in popularity and sales, so issues are sure to arise. In November last year, users were left puzzled when the front-end of Tezos-based NFT marketplace Hic et Nunc disappeared. More recently, OpenSea also experienced some issues when an update left some creators unable to mint new NFTs.