Copycats are a scourge of all big-name NFT collections. As it usually happens with high-profile releases, alongside popularity and rise in floor price, they also acquire an army of scammers aiming to capitalize on other people's success. Usually, fraudsters copy the imagery, change it a bit, or even leave it as it is, and offer collectors to buy poor-quality replicas as genuine blue-chip assets.
To solve the problem of copymints, the leading NFT trading platform OpenSea is doing its best to protect collectors from scammers. Thus, the marketplace's recent update concerns a new copymint detection system.
“We’re launching a new copymint detection system today that can identify exact matches, flips, and fuzzy copies within seconds of a mint,” the OpenSea blog post reads.
Recognizing the interests of both original creators and collectors, OpenSea will detect and hide copymints from viewing on its platform. Moreover, the marketplace will delist such collections and block accounts with multiple copymint violations.
Copymint detection comes as a combination of an image detection algorithm and human review. According to OpenSea, an NFT can be considered as a copymint with a further delisting, if it is characterized as:
- A pixel-for-pixel 100% replica of the original collection
- A flipped, rotated, or opposite direction-faced item
- A resized, zoomed-in or out, cropped, or repositioned NFT
- A replica with added or removed borders and edges
- A replica with unintegrated texts, logos, or emojis, either typed or drawn
- A replica that only swaps the background color
- A replica with colors swapped, modified, or saturated
- A pixelated version of the original artwork
It will require seconds for the copymint detector to spot a replica, whether it is rotated, has a different color scheme, or lacks a frame.
Having armed with the useful tool, OpenSea will definitely thin out the ranks of copymints on its platform, allowing both artists and buyers to drop their worries about fraud.
