OpenSea pledges to take action on scams and intellectual property infringement

OpenSea's co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer said the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace would redouble its efforts to curb fraud and plagiarism on the platform. 

In a blog post on Wednesday, Finzer wrote that although fraud, intellectual property (IP) theft and plagiarism are prohibited under OpenSea's terms, "at our scale, comprehensive policies aren’t enough."

Up to now, the platform has built systems to try to combat the bulk of banned activities, with a new verification system, an image scanning "copymint prevention system" and an improved search functionality to help people find authentic content. 

Still, fraud and hacks in the ecosystem are rife, and OpenSea – the largest platform by share of market volume according to data from The Block Research – has previously been criticized for being slow to act on incidents where stolen NFTs were sold on. 

One step OpenSea says it will take to prevent future incidents is to automatically hide suspicious NFT transfers, to lower their visibility on individual profile pages. It also said it has begun working with key rights holders to build image-detection models for automatic takedowns, and will expand this work "tremendously" in the coming months.  

A third measure it has put in place is creating a moderation team as well as adding auto-detection methods for copyright issues and other vectors of fraud.

"With new technology and rapid user adoption come novel challenges. We recognize that as leaders, we have a responsibility to play an outsized, active role in solving these issues," Finzer wrote.