How Optic Detects NFT Fraud with AI and Machine Learning

The NFT space has ongoing issues with fraud, including through bad actors wholesale lifting art from one project and using it in a second project -- a process often referred to as "copyminting." They are derivative projects that have a few too many similarities to the original project to be considered anything other than a ripoff. While most of these duplicate projects do very little sales volume relative to the original, they may damage the underlying brand, contribute to the overall distrust of the NFT space, or trick less savvy buyers into spending money on something that's the jpg equivalent of a street vendor shilling fake Rolex watches. To help combat this fraud, a few companies are emerging that specialize in fraud detection in NFTs. They tend to leverage blockchain data to help determine which project came first and apply some image detection to find metadata matches.