OpenSea is one of the biggest NFT marketplaces, with surging trading volumes. OpenSea update restricts their users to mint new NFTs. All hell broke loose when OpenSea limited their users to five collections and 50 items per collection using their free minting tool a few days back. Before that, OpenSea users were free to mint unlimited NFTs using their internal collection storefront. Users started getting “you have reached the max number in this collection” on their uploads. They faced a huge backlash from their users, which resulted in the reversal of decisions.
OpenSea broke the news on their Twitter account stating, this change might affect their users, so don’t hesitate to contact them.
Their announcement left users in shock, as they were not given any warning before this decision. Due to this, OpenSea faced waves of huge backlash from the NFT community. Several users took to Twitter sharing their minting goal, and now they are stuck to uploading only 50 per collection. Users were infuriated over this sudden decision, sharing that they spent months strategizing their assets. But they can’t deploy them anymore.
Creators shared their experience of quitting their jobs as they saw potential in the NFT industry. Some users were outraged and threatened to take their artwork to alternative NFT platforms. Initially, OpenSea didn’t give any explanation to users for their sudden decision, which led users to assume that it was a bug. Many users threatened the platform to move their assets to other reliable platforms and opt for other avenues. However, due to a huge influx of backlash, OpenSea retracted their decision just after one day of their initial decision. They reactivated the unlimited minting tool and apologized for causing inconvenience to their consumers.
OpenSea also gave an explanation to their users for taking such strong measures. They stated that some users were exploiting their unlimited minting feature, which was initially built for the ease of creators on board. Further explaining about the huge plagiarism, fake collection, and spam issue by a large number of users. Due to this, their platform had become highly saturated which led to limiting everyone to a specific number of collections.
Some users responded that they could’ve dealt with plagiarism and spam in alternative ways, as limiting the items per collection created unnecessary panic among creators. Some suggested that OpenSea should add an account verification feature on every account, not just to high-end brands and known names. Also, scanning each artwork against plagiarism and copy infringement using their machine learning program.
Everything worked fine in the end, but this incident has left a mark on the platform’s repute which might be difficult to recover from. As it often faces technical issues despite being valued at 13.3$ billion. If OpenSea keeps looking away from their user’s needs, there might be some serious repercussions to the platform’s image.