The NFT community continues to gain momentum. One of their biggest growing pains they have is authenticity. You can compare most of this to Sybil attacks. These are the main versions of the pain:
- Wash trading - where someone buys/bids on their own creations to give the impression of demand or artificially inflate value. They do this using another ETH address. This practice is kind of an open secret, nobody talks about it but it is rampant.
- Fake items - this gets a lot of attention. Create a new account and pretend to be another creator and list identical items.
- Stolen items - sell artwork that you don’t own, usually from an artist that isn’t in the NFT space.
The response to this problem has been verification, both by the providers and artists. All marketplaces now perform account verifications themselves. They take slightly different approaches but they all aim to mitigate the issues above. Most start with a Twitter verification first. But this has created a new pain of being crushed under success. They get thousands of verification requests per day. As small startups they can’t handle the load.
Artists themselves are taking the approach of trying to demonstrate on social platforms that they are real.
PoH is in a great position to mitigate these pains. Starting by proving you are human and not a duplicate in the ecosystem creates a foundation light years ahead of anything else being discussed.
- A marketplace could require creators to first verify they are human, before moving on to verify they are the creators of the work. This would weed out the ability for attackers to create endless accounts (ETH addresses) and significantly reduce customer service load.
- A marketplace or other service provider could add PoH as on of the social verifications (like verify Twitter) and display an extra badge to any creator that does.
- A creator could register through PoH and display proof of humanity on website / social profiles / etc.
Great fit right? Bringing humanity to NFTs.
But what is the best marketing approach? Anyone have contacts at OpenSea / Rarible / Foundation (I have one through Mark Cuban for SuperRare but they are already so selective I don’t think it would be a great fit)? Anyone have contact to some of the NFT influencers (getting someone like Aito onboard would be huge)?
Bonus: Artists and $UBI is a dream match.
