Marketplace suspends most NFT sales, citing 'rampant' fakes and plagiarism

LONDON: The platform which sold an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.9 million has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a "fundamental problem" in the fast-growing digital assets market.

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Sales of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, soared to around $25 billion in 2021, leaving many baffled as to why so much money is being spent on items that do not physically exist and which anyone can view online for free.

NFTs are crypto assets that record the ownership of a digital file such as an image, video or text. Anyone can create, or "mint", an NFT, and ownership of the token does not usually confer ownership of the underlying item.

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Reports of scams, counterfeits and "wash trading" have become commonplace.

The U.S.-based Cent executed one of the first known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold the former Twitter CEO's tweet as an NFT last March. But as of Feb. 6, it has stopped allowing buying and selling, CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters.