Counterfeit and scam projects are rampant on OpenSea. Is this the rise of memes or rampant speculation?
Ethereum is a dark forest, and so is OpenSea.Author: Wang Jiajian
Source: 8btc
The hype around NFTs has exploded.
On the 23rd, Visa announced the purchase of a CryptoPunk for $150,000, triggering a buying frenzy. On the same day, the transaction volume for CryptoPunks reached 27,821 ETH, approximately $92.22 million. Both the daily transaction volume and value hit historical highs. OpenSea's trading volume reached $194 million, a 55.2% increase from the previous day. The amount of ETH burned on OpenSea surpassed 10,000, valued at about $33 million.
These figures demonstrate that NFTs have entered the FOMO stage. In the NFT space, there are also several noteworthy developments that are part of today's NFT wave and deserve attention.
Imitation, unabashed imitation
"EtherRock," an extremely well-known NFT project on Ethereum, consists of 100 NFTs, each depicting an image of a rock, with only slight color variations among them. On August 23, one of the rocks was sold for 250 ETH, worth about $830,000. Earlier, Sun Yuchen purchased another rock for 187 ETH.
The NFT trading site OpenSea has a TopNFTs leaderboard that includes the top 200 projects over different time frames, such as 24 hours and 7 days.
Looking at the 24-hour dimension, we find multiple "rock imitations" making their way into the top 200. Let's take a look at them.
Ranked 105th is a project called Eeherpaper. What does its introduction say? "Because paper beats rock. That's it."
Ranked 90th on OpenSea is etherscissors official, which states: "Because scissors beat paper, it's that simple."
We have rock, paper, and scissors. A little game could be set up. Think that's the end? Not quite, there are more projects.
This is just a glimpse of the poorly executed imitation projects targeting Ethereum rocks. Imitations of Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club are also emerging in large numbers, often ranking higher and gaining more recognition, but we won't list them all.
However, we can take a look at imitations on Solana. For example, Solanart is a trading platform on Solana similar to OpenSea. A currently popular project called SolPunks is clearly an imitation of Cryptopunks. According to the data, the floor price is 9.45 SOL.
If we only consider the similarity of "content," there are indeed many very poorly executed imitations like the ones mentioned above. In terms of trends, the OpenSea leaderboard is almost entirely dominated by avatar-type NFT projects.
Doesn't this remind you of May 2021, when zoo-themed projects were crazily launched, completely stirring up the entire cryptocurrency market?
Is this imitation one of the cultural factors of MEME? Or is it outright speculation?
Scams, brazen and rampant scams
MAO DAO is a Chinese project in the metaverse gaming guild space, very similar to Yield Guild Games (YGG), the traffic driver behind Axie Infinity. Recently, they released two batches of a total of 4,000 cat image NFTs. Within 24 hours, the trading volume surged to rank seventh, ahead of Meebits. Amid the high heat, some investors complained of being scammed.
It turns out that an investor found an NFT for the project "Ready Player Cat" on OpenSea through a search. After purchasing it, he quickly discovered that the cat was fake.
What does this mean? OpenSea is like the Taobao of NFTs; anyone can download images from a certain NFT project, upload them to OpenSea to create an NFT, and set a selling price, often slightly lower than the true project's floor price, just waiting for investors to fall into the trap.
These fake shops can be very misleading, especially for Chinese investors, as the English interface of OpenSea, combined with the high FOMO sentiment, makes it easy to fall victim to scams in the heat of the moment.
A quick check shows that there are at least three fake shops for the MAO DAO project on OpenSea. At first glance, they look identical.
In fact, fake goods are rampant on OpenSea. The image below is a popular proof; searching for "EtherRock" reveals many fakes.
Can you report to OpenSea? The answer is no. Investors can only rely on themselves to be vigilant.
In reality, it's easy to distinguish between real and fake; the total number of project NFTs, owners, floor price, and trading volume are very intuitive data. Projects with fewer NFTs are definitely fake, as creating fakes incurs costs, and uploading fake NFTs requires a gas fee.
NFTs are believed to largely prevent counterfeits, but ironically, today, the largest NFT trading platform, OpenSea, may have become the largest counterfeit selling platform. The blockchain is a dark forest, and OpenSea is no different.
Is OpenSea doing nothing? Not exactly; recently, a project called "Sad Frogs District" was removed from OpenSea due to copyright infringement.
From rampant imitations to rampant scams, coupled with the current frenzy of NFT projects being launched, do you think the market has reached a turning point?
