Six months ago, we launched FEATURED with our first-ever campaign with production designer Dylan Cole — the creator of the legendary environments in Lord of the Rings and Avatar, to name a few. Despite our small team, our main focus has been on helping brands across the world make their first entry into the world of NFTs. That’s enabled us to follow up with primary drops from different brands and artists, including a collection celebrating Binance’s 4th birthday, a collection stemming from a collaboration between an artist and a musician, a collection from Formula E’s newest video game, a collection bridging the gap between fashion and NFTs by the Paris fashion house Balmain, and a South-Korean PODO Museum exhibit turned into digital collectibles. Now, our newest campaign makes us the first to introduce the world of K-pop to the world of NFTs by featuring a collection in conjunction with THE SHOW, a K-pop music TV series airing in 76 countries.

Our aim is to build a platform that makes it effortlessly easy for anyone around the world to mint, sell, and trade their NFTs with their crypto wallets. With FEATURED, everyone can interact with the smart contract without having to code anything. Among the feedback we’ve gotten so far, we’ve heard users saying that FEATURED is one of the most accessible decentralized platforms — and for that we’re thankful.

But as any other open platform, we’ve encountered our share of spams and scams on the marketplace. While we’ve made it easy and cheap to create NFTs, it’s also made it easy for questionable actors to copy NFTs from other platforms — typically NFTs from the Ethereum ecosystem such as OpenSea. Initially, our response to that was to critically review each NFT that was minted on FEATURED and look for suspicious ones.

As a non-custodial platform, all NFTs on our platform are minted via the smart contract into the creator’s wallet. All sales are done between two wallets and we never custody any NFTs or uses’ funds. As the wallet controls the ownership of these NFTs, only the owner of the wallet may remove or burn an NFT, which is a function available on our platform. There is really no way for us, the platform operator, to ‘remove’ an NFT. We can, however, hide it on our web interface so those suspicious NFTs are not available to be seen anymore and no further resales are possible on our platform.

Looking for suspicious NFTs manually isn’t scalable — and we understood that quickly. We had to be quick on our feet, so we had our developers put together a way for the community to help with reporting those NFTs. While we still need to carefully review every single community report, the community reporting system allows us to provide more coverage of NFTs on the marketplace.

And although we’ve made significant improvements, we’re still not satisfied with the process of handling spams. That’s why, on a regular Friday night, during a catch-up call with Numbers Protocol — a Binance portfolio company — the idea of an integration sparked.

Numbers Protocol is an app that’s building a decentralized photo network with a mission to put trust and value back in digital media. In our attempts to make FEATURED the number one decentralized and non-custodial NFT marketplace, joining forces with Numbers Protocol will help us get closer to that mission via verifying artwork and building trust around digital media — with an emphasis on NFTs.

Since then, the team at Numbers have taken a look at a subset of NFTs on our platform and have done multiple scans to find doubtful NFTs. Among the roughly 34k NFTs that were examined:

175 were found by Ethereum scan (0.51%)
9 were found by Similar-image scan (>0.1%)
767 were reported by the community with URL (2.25%)

The scans currently available from Numbers Protocol are:

1. The Ethereum scan – this scan looks for items with the same CID in the Ethereum network and returns the product page.
2. Similar-image scan – the scan uses a basic AI module to look for similar items in the Ethereum network and returns the associated product page. The key difference between Ethereum scan and Similar-image scan is, Ethereum scan will match the CID of content which means, the content must be exactly the same.
3. Community report – the new beta feature. When there are new requests, we share them with the community members and ask for help. They can mark suspicious items and provide the URL as evidence to prove the photo violates copyright.

This is the first time that we have a holistic view into the uniqueness of the NFTs on our platform. Based on the results of the scans, we’re proud to say that more than 97% of the NFTs on the FEATURED NFT marketplace are newly created artwork. We’re especially thrilled at this number as it aligns with our vision where we believe NFTs are for everyone and not just the privileged who can afford the high gas fees.

All of the NFTs that passed the three levels of scan now have a special mark next to their title on each NFT detailed page (as seen in the image on the top) and if you click on it, it will display a page from Numbers Protocol (as seen in the image on bottom) that lists out scan results.

And it’s been important for us to make the platform accessible for everyone, regardless of location. Yet we still get questions on how to be a qualified NFT creator on our platform. Most of them are happy to learn that they already qualified as long as you have a great idea and are able to get a free crypto wallet. We’re glad that our decentralized approach to an NFT platform is challenging artists and creators to make unique NFTs, and that the number of original creations strongly outweighs scams.