Copycats and fraudulent projects are rampant on Opensea. Has the popularity of NFT reached its peak?

The popularity of NFT has exploded.

On the 23rd, Visa announced that it had purchased a CryptoPunk for $150,000, which triggered a buying frenzy. On the 23rd, CryptoPunks traded 27,821 ETH, equivalent to $92.22 million. Both the daily trading volume and turnover reached a record high. OpenSea's trading volume reached $194 million, up 55.2% from the previous day. OpenSea destroyed more than 10,000 ETH, worth about $33 million.

These data can prove that NFT has entered the Fomo stage. In the field of NFT, there are some things happening that are worth paying attention to. They are part of today's NFT wave and deserve attention.

Imitation, unscrupulous imitation

"EtherRock" is a well-known NFT project on Ethereum. It has a total of 100 NFTs, each of which is a picture of a stone. These 100 stones only have slight differences in color. On August 23, one of the stones was sold for 250 ETH, worth about $830,000. Earlier, Justin Sun bought another stone for 187 ETH.

The NFT trading website Opensea has a TopNFTs ranking list, which includes the top 200 projects in different time dimensions such as 24 hours and 7 days.

Taking 24 hours as a dimension, we found that many "stone imitations" have entered the top 200. Let's take a look at them one by one.

Number 105 is a project called Eeherpaper. What does its introduction say? "Because paper is better than rock. Period."

Opensea ranking No. 90, etherscissorsoffcial (Ethereum scissors), the project introduction: "Because scissors are better than paper, it's that simple."

We have rock-paper-scissors. Now we can play a little game. Do you think that's all? No, there are still a few more items.

This is just a crude imitation project of Ethereum Stone on the Ethereum chain. There are also many imitation projects of Cryptopunks and BoredApeYachtClub, which are ranked higher and more well-known. I will not list them one by one.

But we can look at the imitations on Solana. For example, Solanart is a trading platform on Solana similar to Opnesea. A popular project at present is called SolPunks, which is obviously a Cryptopunks imitation. According to the data, the floor price is 9.45 SOL.

If we only look at the similarity of "content", there are already many such very poor imitations. If we look at the situation, the current Opensea rankings are almost dominated by avatar NFT projects.

Isn’t this very similar to May 2021, when zoo-like projects were launched crazily, completely stirring up the entire cryptocurrency market.

Is this kind of imitation one of the cultural factors of MEME or is it pure speculation?

Fraud, rampant fraud

MAODAO is a Chinese project of the Metaverse Play and Earn Guild type, very similar to YieldGuildGames (YGG), the traffic promoter behind AxieInfinity. Recently, they released two batches of 4,000 cat image NFTs. The trading volume in 24 hours rushed to the seventh place in the ranking, ranking ahead of Meebits. Under the high popularity, some investors complained that they were cheated.

It turned out that an investor found the NFT being sold on Opensea by searching for the project name ReadyPlayerCatNFT. Then he made a purchase. He soon discovered that the cat was fake.

What does this mean? Opensea is like Taobao for NFTs. Anyone can download a picture of an NFT project, upload it to Opensea and make it into an NFT. Then they can mark the selling price, which is often slightly lower than the NFT floor price of the real project, just waiting for investors to be trapped.

This type of fake store is very deceptive, especially to Chinese investors, because Opensea's English page and the high popularity of Fomo sentiment make it easy for them to be deceived by the impulse to buy.

A quick search revealed that there are no less than 3 fake stores on Opensea for the MAODAO project alone. At a glance, they are exactly the same.

In fact, Opnese is already flooded with fakes. The picture below is proof that it is very popular. Searching for "EtherRock" will bring up many fakes.

Can I report it to Opnesea? The answer is no. Investors can only keep their eyes open.

In fact, it is very easy to distinguish the real from the fake. The data such as the total amount of NFTs in the project, owners, floor price and transaction volume are very intuitive. The small quantity is definitely fake, because there is a cost for counterfeiting. After uploading fake NFTs, a GAS fee is required for quotation.

NFT is believed to be able to prevent counterfeits to a large extent, but ironically, today Opensea, the largest NFT trading platform, may already be the largest platform for selling counterfeits. Blockchain is a dark forest, and so is Opensea.

Is Opensea doing nothing? Not really. Recently, a project called "SadFrogsDistrict" was deleted by Opensea due to copyright infringement.

From the proliferation of copycats to rampant fraud, and considering the current craze for launching NFT projects, do you think the market has reached a turning point?