Just a year ago, the blockchain-based network Cent was at the forefront of the growing craze for nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrency-based social platforms. In late March, crypto evangelist and then–Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first-ever tweet as an NFT for nearly $3 million exclusively on a Cent-based trading platform called Valuables; the winning bidder then spent another million to buy an NFT of a tweet from Elon Musk. These were among the first-ever million-dollar NFT sales, making Cent a notable name in the booming crypto space: It earned investments from the founders of Quibi and LinkedIn, as well as artists like will.i.am. Last summer, co-founder and CEO Cameron Hejazi said that his company was raising $3 million to support creators who wished to mint NFTs across Cent, including JPEGs and tweets, while continuing to support coin trading and wallet storage on the platform.
That all changed earlier this month. On Feb. 6, Hejazi halted “most transactions” on Cent, including “buying and selling” NFTs of everything except tweets on Valuables. As he told Reuters, there were “rampant” problems with “people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs” and “making NFTs of content which does not belong to them,” and he couldn’t stop these fraudulent transactions and bad actors at a fast enough rate to stem their spread. Even though he’s still running Cent and plans to continue operating in the crypto space, Hejazi has stated that this kind of…
