At OpenSea, we’re working around the clock to welcome more people into the world of NFTs. As the NFT ecosystem continues to evolve, imitation and plagiarism are growing issues that hinder trust in this space. While our efforts here are just the beginning, we’re excited to announce several changes aimed at improving authenticity on OpenSea.

Our changes cover two areas:

1. An updated account verification and collection badging system that broadens the number of creators eligible for verification.
2. An automated system to help identify, remove, and prevent instances of “copymints” (copies of authentic NFT content).

Updated Approach to Verification

Account verification and collection badging on OpenSea are intended to help both creators and collectors by surfacing authentic accounts and content more prominently.

But we’ve heard from our community that eligibility for verification and badging is opaque and the process is slow and cumbersome. So we’re rolling out four changes to the system:

1. Switching to an invite-based system that broadens the number of creators eligible for verification. To start, any account with more than 100 ETH of collection volume will be invited to apply – we will continue broadening eligibility and invitations beyond this first tranche as we learn more.
2. An updated collection badge process that allows verified accounts to request badging for a collection with significant interest or sales (starting at 100 ETH of volume or more, broadening eligibility soon).
3. A new streamlined, in-product experience that notifies eligible creators directly on their profile pages and guides them through the process of account verification and collection badging.
4. A dedicated customer support team that will respond to account verification and collection badging applications within 7 days.

Please note that these changes apply going forward, and projects that are currently verified will not lose their existing verification.

This is just the start, and OpenSea is committed to a goal where any authentic creator’s account can be verified while keeping scammers out of the system. Check out our verification blog post for more information about our updates.

Reducing Copymints on OpenSea

Copymints are another problem that can sometimes make it difficult for the OpenSea community to find authentic content with confidence. At the same time, we’ve seen incredible communities come together through substantively additive remixes, and we want to encourage these creative universes to thrive.

We’re committed to threading the needle between removing copymints and giving space for those substantively additive remixes to prosper. So today, we’re announcing a two-part system to help with this goal:

1. Image Recognition Technology – Our new copymint prevention system leverages computer-vision tech to scan all NFTs on OpenSea (including new mints). The system then matches these scans against a set of authentic collections, starting with some of the most copy-minted collections — we’ll look for flips, rotations & other permutations. We’ll expand this set over the coming months and constantly train our models to improve detection.
2. Dedicated Human Review – Making this image recognition technology work requires dedicated “humans in the loop” who can review removal recommendations and train our models continuously.

With this system, our long-term goal is two-pronged: first, with help from our community, to eliminate all existing copymints on OpenSea; and second, to help prevent new copymints from appearing in the first place. We’ve already started the process of delisting identified copymint collections, and we’ll scale up our removal process in phases over the next several weeks.

We consider these programs and products collectively as OpenSea’s lighthouse – helping protect creators and collectors and ensuring our community can navigate the world of NFTs confidently. Together, we believe these changes simultaneously improve trust in the NFT ecosystem by elevating authentic content and removing plagiarized works.

Our work here is ongoing and we still have more to do; but we’re committed to continuous improvements and welcome the feedback of our community on these efforts.