It’s now scanning for fraud across 4m newly minted NFTs each week. How do you sue the anonymous holder of a crypto wallet? In which jurisdiction?”ĭeviantArt, a decades-old online community for digital artists that hosts half a billion pieces of digital art, began monitoring the blockchain for copies of their users’ work last fall after NFTs based on stolen work by Qing Han, a beloved artist who died in 2020 after publicly chronicling her struggle with cancer, were found for sale on OpenSea.ĭeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said. It’s as simple as right-click, save,” said Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator and expert in digital art at the Albright-Knox gallery in Buffalo, New York. “It is much easier to make forgeries in the blockchain space than in the traditional art world. Among the problems is that anyone can “mint” a digital file as an NFT, whether or not they have rights to it in the first place, and the process is anonymous by default. “It’s 1,000% better than a year ago, two years ago, when there was no marketplace for any of this art.”īut other artists say that the past year’s crypto boom has been a nightmare. “We’re in an incredible mushrooming of opportunity for digital artists,” said Schachter. In theory, blockchain technology was supposed to make it easier for digital artists to sell unique tokens of ownership, offering buyers a permanent record of ownership linked to the work.įor some artists, the technology opened up a new way to earn money : Kenny Schachter, a New York-based video artist and art writer, embraced NFTs early and said he has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past year, after three decades working within an art world in which video art rarely sold. The company said it was working to build new image recognition and other tools that would quickly recognize stolen content and protect creators, and that it planned to launch some of them in the first half of this year. OpenSea said in a statement: “It is against our policy to sell NFTs using plagiarized content,” adding that it regularly delisted and banned accounts that did so. But amid its spectacular rise, the company is doing far too little to prevent the trade in fraudulent NFTs, some artists charge, and is placing much of the burden of policing art fraud on the artists themselves. OpenSea has grown at a dizzying pace, and is now valued at $13bn. The rise in such thefts comes as the market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, exploded last year, growing to an estimated $22bn, attracting Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and driving multimillion-dollar auctions for these new certificates of ownership of digital assets.
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