NFTs offered for free through NFT Bay - Reignites Controversy


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