Not Okay Bears Delisting Causes Controversy, Analysis of OpenSea's Content Governance Dilemma

Author: Nian Qing, Chain Catcher

Editors: Demian, Gu Yu

The ecological NFT on Solana is gaining momentum, and as the most explosive blue-chip NFT project on the Solana chain, "Calm Bears" Okay Bears has also continued to be popular recently. The 1.5 SOL at the time of the public sale has soared to 193 SOL. But when people were still discussing the bright future of the Solana NFT market and whether Okay Bears would replace BAYC in the near future, there was an oolong event.

This wave also heated up an imitation NFT of "Calm Bears": "Not Okay Bears". Not Okay Bears is a mirror NFT of Okay Bears, but minted on Ethereum. according toNansenfirst level title

1. Clear narrative of Not Okay Bears: ETH > Solana

This growth is mainly due to a large number of sweeps and orders from some NFT KOLs. in,HustlerOn May 16th, a shoutout tweet fully created controversy and attracted a lot of traffic for Not Okay Bears. He pointed out that Not Okay Bears is an NFT on the Ethereum chain, "not for those poor people", pointing atSolana is a "poor man's chain". And comment on every tweet saying that he bought Not Okay Bears NFT: "Cheers to not being poor" (applause for not being poor).

Whether it is joking or spoofing. Not Okay Bears is therefore given a clear narrative:ETH > SOL。 

The "ETH VS SOL" debate has been around since last year. The new public chain Solana, known as the "Ethereum Killer", has attracted a large number of developers due to its low gas and high performance. Solana also takes "introducing one billion users to Web3" as its mission. In April of this year, OpenSea officially launched Solana. With the popularity of NFTs on the Solana chain, many people began to ridicule. Everyone bought NFTs on Solana because they couldn’t afford the boring apes and Punks on ETH. Many Solana community members even laughed at themselves I am "poor".

After Hustler threw out "Solana is for the poor", the discussion of "ETH VS SOL" was revived. As in "NFTs on ETH or NFTs on Solana: The Chicken and Egg ProblemThe article mentioned that although Solana saves users more money than competitors, there is still a lack of products on the platform. Most new NFT projects are still based on ETH, and it is difficult for these alternative chains to establish a first-mover advantage. also,Some people would rather pay high gas fees than put their assets on the world's largest public chain. The reason behind it is the same as "why Rolex watches are sold much more than other watches".

Since then, the Fomo sentiment surrounding Not Okay Bears has intensified. As a "plagiarized" NFT, its popularity ranking on Opensea once surpassed the original project Okay Bears, ranking first. At this point, it seems to be a victory for ETH NFT.

But soon, Not Okay Bears was taken off the shelves by Opensea, based on DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act). In the early hours of May 18th, Beijing time, in the Opensea Discord community, many users had inquired about the removal of the Not Ok Bears NFT and technical operation issues. The reason given by the administrator was that the project "violated protected knowledge" property".

Currently, although Not Okay Bears is delisted, users can still trade in other NFT markets such as X2Y2 and LooksRare. After being delisted, the project quickly became cold, and the floor price fell below 0.1ETH, but this does not mean that the project has failed. In a recent Twitter Space, the project announced that Hustler, the "cargo king", became the founder of Not Okay Bears. The extinguished enthusiasm of the community was rekindled, and the price of NFT rose again, and the floor price was pulled back to above 0.1ETH .

The Not Okay Bears community is still outraged. On the one hand, they think that Opensea’s reasons and actions for delisting NFT are too “sloppy” because there are still a large number of imitation disks on Opensea. If it is simply because the project is too hot, then why don’t Bored Ape Solana Club and SolPunks on the equally popular Solana chain do any processing?

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2. OpenSea audit standards cause controversy

This is not the first time Opensea has taken down counterfeit NFTs.

At the end of December last year, OpenSea banned two accounts for plagiarizing the works of Boring Ape: PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club. Even though the plagiarists' so-called "rich people who challenge monopoly assets in order to promote decentralization" seemed a little weak, but at that time there were many voices against OpenSea's "centralized" freezing method, after all, it was against Due to the "resistance to censorship" feature of blockchain technology.

In addition, the more well-known delisted NFTs include Ahri NFT series ALI & HIS FRIENDS, but this time the delisting was due to technical reasons and potential safety hazards. After Ahri NFT fixed the metadata leakage problem, it has been re-launched .

Regarding infringement, another well-known example is that in July last year, a Caixin reporter took a photo of a Tibetan woman carrying a mining machine. The oil painting "Rice Gleaners" quickly became popular, and was uploaded to OpenSea in the form of NFT after the second creation. The price ranged from a few to a dozen ETH, and the highest price even reached 2021 ETH. The teacher himself is still struggling with the rent.

In January of this year, OpenSea, which is in a period of rapid development, launched a free NFT minting service in order to encourage more creators. Users can mint NFT for free without paying Gas fees. This means anyone can create and sell NFTs without uploading censorship.

While the service has brought growth to the platform, it has also brought broader infringements.Some time ago, as Irenezhao's NFT became popular on the Internet, some people turned all Irenezhao's photos into nude photos and made them into NFTs and put them on OpenSea for sale. Some even uploaded the "pornographic photos" from Edison Chen's "Pornographic Event" in his early years to OpenSea. At present, these infringing NFT works have been officially removed from the shelves.

OpenSea admitted that its act of "lowering the threshold" "screwed up" the ecology of the entire platform, and claimed that more than 80% of the NFTs minted through this mechanism are plagiarism, infringement, fraud, and garbage and vulgar works. The reality is that as the OPensea platform grows bigger and bigger, how to balance the conflict between copyright protection and the spirit of web3.0 decentralization has become an increasingly urgent problem to be solved.

Despite OpenSea's claim that "the security team actively monitors the platform,"However, the current content supervision still mainly relies on the "inert mechanism". The so-called inertia mechanism means that the content is freely released by users, and the platform will decide whether to remove the infringing NFT on the platform only after it is reported.Moreover, Opensea's global team currently has only 110 employees, which shows that it does not have a large audit team like traditional Internet companies.

The most direct result of this is the proliferation of infringing NFTs on the platform. In addition, some unidentified NFT buyers will be "cut" and become the ultimate victims.For example, many users complained in the OpenSea Discord community that the Not Okay Bears NFT they purchased was taken off the shelves by OpenSea without receiving any notice, and they only learned about the infringement of the project after asking the administrator. Receive any "risk warning" from OpenSea.

Opensea is also trying other ways to reduce infringement, but judging from the current situation of piracy on the platform, these ways have little effect. In order to ensure security and user accessibility, OpenSea has worked with the community to identify and delete some NFTs. In order to reduce plagiarism and fake projects, OpenSea also announced this month that it is adding NFT plagiarism detection and verification functions. This includes rolling out a new system to detect and remove fake NFTs, adjusting the account verification process, and more.

In addition, OpenSea also revealed that they are deploying a brand new copy detection system that can use image recognition technology to scan NFTs on the platform and compare them with real collectibles, looking for flips, rotations and other variants, OpenSea of human reviewers will also be involved in detection and will review removal suggestions.

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3. What kind of content governance is needed in the Web3 era?

Based on the above analysis, a topic worthy of further discussion is whether OpenSea, as a decentralized platform, has the motivation to change its own "lazy audit" mechanism?

Different from the Web2 content platform, OpenSea’s income mainly comes from the 2.5% transaction fee. NFT creators have no copyright relationship with the platform. Therefore, infringements are only aimed at the creators and have little impact on the platform. Therefore, from an economic perspective Based on interests, OpenSea lacks the power of the Web2 content platform to crack down on infringements.Moreover, for a platform that is in an explosive period like OpenSea, review means restricting the content creativity of creators, which is not conducive to the rapid expansion of the platform.

Infringing content on the Internet often has a clear regulatory mechanism. In some cases, the platform also bears certain joint and several liabilities, and may even suffer huge fines. Therefore, there is a clear motivation to establish a systematic review mechanism for platform content. But for the current decentralized platform, even if it cannot effectively supervise the content, what it faces is nothing more than criticism from public opinion. Therefore, the platform lacks sufficient motivation to put content supervision on a higher priority.

Although most people agreed with OpenSea's review of NFT, some people still raised doubts:As a decentralized platform, do you have the right to delete and remove works without authorization?So, if OpenSea has the right to delist, does that mean they are obliged to assess and control the risks of NFT projects? If we follow this path, wouldn't the end become a centralized world like web2.0?

Of course, it is necessary to review and crack down on infringing NFTs. The key lies in how to establish a complete review mechanism while minimizing negative impact on users. In addition, users also need to do a good job of research before purchasing NFT, including the NFT distribution team, intellectual property rights, potential risks, etc., to avoid unnecessary trouble and loss.

In any case, the current proliferation of infringing content is a major stain on Opensea, which is valued at tens of billions of dollars, and may lead to further stigmatization of the industry. Opensea needs to consider how to further improve its content review system. As for Internet companies like Also establish a systematic and large-scale audit department, or use tokens to motivate and mobilize the enthusiasm of its community, jointly formulate an audit system and participate in specific audits. How to build a content governance mechanism that belongs to the web3 ecology is the challenge and difficulty that Opensea and all NFT trading platforms will face.