A software developer from Australia freely distributed thousands of non-fungible token images, claiming it was an art project designed to demonstrate the absurdity of property-rights concepts in digital assets.

The creator of the project, Geoff Huntley, an open-source software engineer who reverse-engineered the COVIDSafe app which was created by the federal government during the pandemic.

He claims to have gathered all of the photos associated with NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains and put them up on a website modelled after the infamous Pirate Bay.

Non-fungible token (NFT) collectables have been extremely popular in the previous year, with billions of dollars being spent on them. Meanwhile, many in the crypto community believe that NFTs are useless and that anyone can simply right-click the NFT image and possess the artwork without paying. Huntley points out that images connected with NFT property rights are rarely stored on the blockchain. 

This "billion-dollar torrent" hosts all the non-fungible token. The NFT Bay works in a similar way to The Pirate Bay (TPB), hosting a large number of NFTs originating from blockchain platforms. It includes a link to the torrent, which consumers can utilise to download the seeded files using a torrenting platform. The NFT Bay appears to be a clone of TPB, with the same website colour schemes and even the TPB logo.

Geoff's press statements mention "Art" as a reason for doing this. Furthermore, after describing his background, Geoff explained a little bit more about the fundamental reason behind thenftbay.org.

"Fundamentally, I hope through thenftbay.org people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more [than] directions on how to access or download [an] image."

He adds, "The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I’ve seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value."

Pavan A

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA