Over 80% of “lazy minted” NFTs on OpenSea are plagiarised, fake or spam

If I could describe NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in one word, it would be ‘controversial’. It seems like almost everyone has an opinion on NFTs and you either love them or hate them. Even though the crypto marketplace has been called fraudulent by critics, some people have benefitted from it. Whether you’re a Malaysian rapper, artist, or a 12-year-old kid, it’s possible to make a lot of money with this technology.

OpenSea is an online marketplace where people can buy and sell NFTs. All those people I’ve mentioned used OpenSea to ‘mint’, or create, their NFTs, and it has become the largest NFT marketplace available right now. Normally, you would have to pay a ‘gas fee’ to mint your NFTs, but OpenSea has a free ‘lazy minting’ tool that allows you to create NFTs with no gas fees. While there are some NFTs made by genuine artists on the site, OpenSea themselves revealed that over 80% of the NFTs minted using this tool were plagiarised works, fake collections, and spam.

The free minting tool, called the ‘collection manager’, was created in 2020 to be a way for new artists to start making NFTs, but has quickly turned into a way to make a quick buck, with misuse increasing exponentially.

Due to this misuse, OpenSea added a limit to this tool, only allowing users to mint up to five collections with 50 NFTs per collection. While it seemed like a good way to prevent fraud, it was still met with backlash. Many users of this tool complained about not being about to complete their collections anymore since it’s more than 50 NFTs per collection.

Since it’s a free service, I’m inclined to say ‘beggars can’t be choosers’, but I guess OpenSea disagrees. After hearing back from the community, OpenSea reversed the decision and removed the 50 item limit.

As OpenSea removed the limit, the question still stands as to how the misuse will be addressed. Through a Twitter thread, they announced that they are “working through a number of solutions to ensure we support our creators while deterring bad actors.” OpenSea plans to preview these changes to the community before rolling them out. They seem to have learned their lesson since the limit was added without prior preview or warning to the community. In the meantime, we will simply have to deal with plagiarised works, fake collections, and spam on the platform.

Is OpenSea’s free minting tool even free?

The ‘lazy minting’ collection manager utilises something called a ‘smart contract’. OpenSea says that this is the “first way to make & sell Non-Fungible Tokens for free, without paying gas”, but is this really true?

The smart contract makes it so that the NFTs are not transferred onto the chain until the first purchase or transfer is made. Once the transaction is done, the buyer can be the one paying the gas fee instead of the seller. This sounds nice, but if it’s your first listing, then you have to pay gas fees associated with initializing your account, so you technically can’t mint NFTs on OpenSea without any fees.

You also have to be careful when listing NFTs, because you might get tricked into paying unwanted gas fees like this Redditor on r/OpenSea. The user had to pay the initial USD 14 (~RM58) fee as well as a USD 59 (~RM247) fee, likely due to the seller asking for a different price which led to another blockchain transaction.

Hidden fees and scams aside, the environmental impact of NFTs might be enough to deter you from getting into the crypto space. If you decide to get into NFTs in the future, then I implore you to do your research so you know exactly how the system works before you partake in it.

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