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Tovera is one of the companies sniffing out fraud in transactions involving non-fungal tokens (NFTs), and now it has teamed up with another anti-fraud company SnifflesNFT.
Tovera in Chicago acquired SnifflesNFT for an unknown price. The idea is to screen NFTs in marketplaces like OpenSea (which dominates the NFT market) for fake NFTs that can trick users out of their money.
Sniffles has developed a technology that detects unauthorized coins minted, automates removal requests on NFT marketplaces, and notifies collectors who hold unauthorized digital content.
Tovera has also developed its own NFT image recognition technology for both marketplaces and consumers. At present, Tovera believes it is the only company to offer a free version of the technology at FNFTF.io. An enterprise version, Tovera Match, is also available for marketplaces.
“We have spent the past year addressing the issues of fraud and trust in the web3 ecosystem with an initial emphasis on NFTs,” said Kristian Kielhofner, founder and CEO of Tovera, in an interview with GamesBeat.
As a scam and plagiarism scandal unfolds around OpenSea, the largest NFT market, copy-scamming poses a major threat to the entire NFT ecosystem. Without the right tools in place to inform consumers, bots steal digital art and make it without the artists’ permission on NFT marketplaces. The Sniffles team joins Tovera to strengthen the image tracking capabilities to help identify even the smallest changes to NFTs and empower the web3 community to be part of the solution. OpenSea said it was trying to do something about the scam, and it talked about its new copy-mint protection system and its efforts to hide suspicious NFTs.
Tovera’s efforts
The SnifflesNFT team will join Tovera and work to advance the company’s image recognition technology, which is at the heart of Tovera Match and FNFTF.io. FNFTF.io is free to use and available to anyone interested in verifying the authenticity of an NFT. Together, the companies will help NFT marketplaces fight counterfeiting, NFT creators protect their intellectual property and NFT consumers avoid scams.
“We started SnifflesNFT to help artists protect their work,” Mert Hilmi Iseri, founder of SnifflesNFT, said in a statement. “Fraud erodes trust in ecosystems, and without trust there will be no web3 ecosystem. Marketplaces like OpenSea know they have a massive problem in their hands, and yet they simply do the bare minimum to help artists. ”
He added, “Their latest announcement is nothing more than lip service and it does not reach the core of the problem, which is much wider than just a single blockchain. We are here to set the standard of what it means. to be a reliable marketplace for the entire NFT economy. “
to fight fraud
As the OpenSea debacle continues to unfold, copying scams pose a major threat to the entire NFT ecosystem. Without the right tools in place to inform consumers, bots steal digital art and make it without the artists’ permission on NFT marketplaces. The Sniffles team joins Tovera to strengthen its image tracking capabilities to help identify even the smallest changes to NFTs and empower the Web3 community to be part of the solution.
“Tovera is on a mission to bring trust to Web3, while also ensuring the authenticity and origin of NFTs,” Kielhofner said. “By acquiring SnifflesNFT, we will accelerate our mission by expanding our team and incorporating advanced image recognition technology. We look forward to building trust with our upcoming partnerships with NFT marketplaces. ”
For creators and collectors, Tovera Match technology can be used for free at FNFTF.io. For marketplaces, Tovera Match is also available via API to drive authentication on NFT platforms. FNFTF.io allows users to upload any NFT and view results based on image agreement, contract, date and blockchain. Additional details including file type, block number and token ID are also available with more data coming soon.
Tovera has embarked on a proactive treatment, verification and origin approach for multiple chain support and marketplace support.
“We quickly realized that there is a tremendous amount of fraudulent activity and consequent trust issues in the hundreds of millions of NFT assets that are already there,” Kielhofner said. “So that’s why we created our reactive approach, Tovera Match, to address much of the fraud that is taking place in space today.”
Indexing NFTs with the millions
The company can index every NFT and NFT transaction on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, he said.
“And we make every aspect of the NFT, including the content, searchable so that a creator or a marketplace or an end user, consumer or collector can get the full historical perspective on any NFT they review to determine if it is the original authentic NFT or if it is a copy, ”he helped.
The details are available on the blockchain in terms of historical timestamps for NFT transactions. And usually the original and authentic NFT is the one that has the oldest time stamp.
The company gets its hands on the content and the metadata associated with it. “NFTs are fundamentally stored outside the chain,” Kielhofner said. “They can be stored in a variety of different places. Doing the secondary crossover and retrieving content is therefore a bit of a technical challenge that we have addressed. And then we take that content and index it so that we can quickly and reliably search for that content for visually identical and visually similar images. ”
Users can search for NFTs on FNFTF.io, and if the result comes back negative with only one item, they can be more sure that it is an original.
“Usually we find half a dozen copies,” Kielhofner said. “The art that appears oldest on the timeline is almost certainly the original NFT.”
One of the problems is “lazy beating, ”Where an NFT is offered for sale, but it is not placed on the blockchain until it is sold. This is a way to get rid of unnecessary “coin fees”, which are the costs associated with recording a transaction or record on the blockchain. But often these NFTs are plagiarized and OpenSea has warned of possible fraud.
“We address a variety of issues for creators. And then for end users on the other side of this transaction, the consumers and the collectors, we enable them to do meaningful research, ”said Kielhofner.
The way to stop some of the fraud is to look at the postings beforehand to the market and see the exact copies of something that already exists or has already been placed on the market. And then that posting should not be allowed to happen a second or third time or more.
“There is certainly a growing awareness of these fraud and trust issues that we believe threaten the entire ecosystem,” Kielhofner said. “And so there are some foresighted [companies] really invest in the long-term health and value of the ecosystem. ”
Tovera has so far been self-financed and has 10 people. The effort started about a year ago and the show is a matter of months in place. Tovera has now indexed about 75 million NFTs.
Kielhofner said he encountered a like-minded thinker in space against fraud when he came across Iseri a few months ago. SnifflesNFT was one of the only other publicly available projects addressing the fraud and counterfeiting issues in NFTs. Within a week, they talked about how they could combine forces.
“It was quite fantastic because Kristian and I had so many shared experiences,” Iseri said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Both of us have sisters who are digital artists and they are passionate about their craft. It is really the little people who suffer the most. ”
Iseri added: “It is no different than taking someone’s original artwork. We actually care and we want to help the artists. It was really a meeting of the thoughts and we got together. “
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