So, I ran into a new and exciting issue on OpenSea yesterday as I was doing some setup for a new ETH smart contract — claiming and setting up the collection on OpenSea.

As most people who’ve been in the space for a while already know, scammers are everywhere in web3. And since there’s so much $$$ in the NFT space, scammers have complicated matters for marketplaces and for NFT teams alike.

Here’s an example of the problem I’ll address here: You’re doing an NFT drop in the next 6 months. It’s going to be called “Nuclear Cat Squad.” (I just made that up. Hopefully there isn’t an actual “Nuclear Cat Squad” already.)

Anyway, so you start doing your various hyping on Twitter and elsewhere, pasting sample NFTs, building up your audience, etc.

At first no one cares because it’s tough to get noticed. But after months of work, you’ve got yourself 10,000 Twitter followers and word is spreading. All is going well.

And then… someone on your Discord says, “Hey, what’s this?” And they link to a collection on OpenSea. Some scammer has collected every single preview image you’ve posted, created an OpenSea account / collection, and has of course taken the name “Nuclear Cat Squad” as well as the URL “nuclearcatsquad” (which is what OpenSea uses for the URL of your collection).

The above scenario has happened about 8 million times to people. It’s actually something that, very early on, we all expected to happen. And so we came up with this process:

Our Previous Solution

To avoid this, we would always advise our clients to grab a temp wallet, go to OpenSea, and setup a whole bunch of collections. We would have them setup “Nuclear Cat Squad” as well as “Nuclear Cats” and “Nuclear Cat Squad NFT” and various other similar names (and also similar URLs). To some extent, this seemed to have deterred scammers, although you can never get ALL of the names you want, and scammers will find a way.

Anyway, when it came time to launch, we would deploy the contract, mint an NFT, and then head over to OpenSea to setup the actual collection. We would have the client login to OpenSea at the same time, and we would have them change “Nuclear Cat Squad” (and the “nuclearcatsquad” URL) to something else (like “Nuclear Cat Squad Old” and “nuclearcatsquadold”). This would free up the names for us to use, using their deployer wallet. And thus, we’d get the actual, desired name and url for the collection.

We’ve actually got a handful of clients with forthcoming collections who’ve done the above already.

OpenSea’s New Code

Yesterday, though, I noticed that the above approach no longer works. When I had the client go in and change his “Nuclear Cat Squad” and “nuclearcatsquad” to something else, it didn’t let me take the name (even if it DID indicate that the name was free). Instead, it alerted me that the name was “too similar” to something else that existed already.

It suggested I reach out to support if there is something wrong. (So, I did that. Will update with their resoponse.)

What’s Wrong Here…

So, I suspect this is one of those good/bad moves that coders can make sometimes. You implement a fix, but the fix creates new problems!

It’s a good thing for existing collections, of course. If someone tries to start a new “Bored Ape Yacht Club,” it’s going to know (rightly so) that this is probably a scam.

But OpenSea’s solutions creates a big problem for unlaunched collections: If NFT teams can no longer create temp / placeholder collections to reserve the official names, then it’s almost 100% certain that scammers will be grabbing/using those names/urls before any collection launches. That’s what they’ve always done, and that’s what they’ll certainly continue to do.

Thus, launching a collection will ALWAYS be a problem from here on out on OpenSea. Anytime you launch, you’re going to clash with whatever scam set has grabbed the name and URL you’d wanted. And so you’re going to have to contact support and hopefully work it out. But that’s going to take time, which is not always in high supply during an NFT launch.

What Does OpenSea Recommend?

I’m awaiting a response to a support ticket on that, in which I’ve asked this question. Will update with their recommendation, if they respond.